It’s not working, but I can at least see where they’re coming from right? In the not-too-distant past, there was very high inequality and we got the French Revolution and several Communist revolutions. What’s different now?
(My assumption is the state power is much greater now, so regimes like North Korea, Iran, Belarus, etc are able to hold power despite making their people unhappy.)
It’s not working, but I can at least see where they’re coming from right? In the not-too-distant past, there was very high inequality and we got the French Revolution and several Communist revolutions. What’s different now?
See, the problem here is that I find ‘where they’re coming from’ as based on fundamentally flawed premises.
For example, before both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution (both February and October/November), the circumstances that led to revolution were not simply “Government is oppressive” - the government had been oppressive for a very long time, and at times much more intensely than at the time of the revolutions. The circumstances and triggers were distinctly aligned along the empowerment of the people - hard-fought-for reforms put revolutionaries and reformers into a position where overthrow of the government was, in the first place, possible - and often begun on terms much more moderate than it would end on.
Imagine if all those on the ‘left’, in the original sense, abstained from participation in the Assembly of Notables, and left it to be a conservative rubber-stamp? Imagine if the restriction and oversight of workers’ organizations in the Russian Empire had made the socialists disengage in participation with them? What revolution would have been possible?
Suffering is not the core element of revolution - if it was, at least a good third of countries (and probably more) in the modern day would be in the process of being overthrown. The power or positioning of those who are dissatisfied is the core element of revolution - and why reforms, even if they fix nothing, are important to any long-term leftist movement.
“If we just make the oppressed suffer a little more, they’ll surely both rise up AND become ideologically aligned with us!” is particularly stupid, considering the already-quite-sparse history of uprisings by oppressed demographics without a fundamental shift in the ideological framework of their society. Generally, they are either unsuccessful, or usher in a “Meet the new boss, same as the old” scenario wherein all that changes is who exactly is in the position of oppressed and oppressor, not a change in the fundamental power dynamics of society.
Dissatisfaction is not education, nor is it inherently inducement to resist. People very often in the history of mankind have submitted to being led to the worst kind of torture and pointless deaths simply because they did not feel themselves in a position of power to resist. It is not the unsupervised prisoners condemned to fates worse than death who overthrow regimes, nor generally the oppressed minorities ready to be tortured to death at a moment’s notice, nor the peasants being hunted down for sport by a chevauchee - it is those who think they have leverage to start with. Desperation can drive a pre-existing revolutionary movement to more drastic action, but it generally does not create revolutionary movements.
(My assumption is the state power is much greater now, so regimes like North Korea, Iran, Belarus, etc are able to hold power despite making their people unhappy.)
I would actually disagree here - the power of the state, in absolute terms, can push repression a bit further, but fundamentally, modern states are more vulnerable to revolutions than states in the past. The cultivation of mass communication and organization means that extremely closed cliques or castes are simply nonviable as a means of maintaining control of the state itself. Without that closed organization, ultimately, while a state can sieve a certain amount of dissent away from security forces by special privileges and background checks, the fact that its protectors and its subjects come from the same stock means that modern states are much more limited in their ability to upset the masses.
Iran is probably the best example of this dynamic - it has to balance feeding extremist propaganda to the population, with projections of strength, and concessions to popular contentment.
If it gave all power to extremist propaganda, the IRGC would effectively run the state - which, other than being displeasing to the clerical fascist class currently ruling, would disincentivize the proper military, the technocrats, and the politicos from cooperation with the state, which would pretty invariably be fatal - either in the form of a coup, or in an inability to resist outside pressure. If it gave all power to projections of strength, then the citizenry’s incentive to cooperate beyond the bare minimum to escape punishment would be eliminated, ironically severely weakening the reality of that strength by reducing the number and quality of those recruited into the security forces and, for that matter, would put the current clerical fascist class at risk of a coup by acknowledging that they have no legitimacy that does not trace back to the security forces. And to give into popular demands - as Iran pointedly did not during the Mahsa Amini protests - would mean a dissolution of the authoritarian state entirely, a revolution with minimal bloodshed, as in post-Franco Spain or the Color Revolutions of Eastern Europe.
For an authoritarian state to last beyond a handful of years, it has to balance all of these factors to prevent both coups and revolutions, whereas generally, pre-modern states only really had to worry about coups insofar as internal dissolution was concerned.
Very well said. It feels like every discussion turns into this dichotomy: suffer in the current system or opt out for change. There are times when those truly are the only two options, but that’s absolutely not the rule.
In plenty of cases, exercising the agency you have doesn’t preclude disruption. It’s possible to vote and organize a wildcat strike. It’s possible to attend a peaceful protest and sabotage the tools of a police state.
Unfortunately the polarization of politics has also fractured the entire spectrum. Any action that doesn’t fit the confines of your political identity is automatically useless or counterproductive. This is what gives attitudes that the meme lampoons: blatant accelerationism dressed in mental gymnastics or an emotional appeal.
Hopeful’s a strong word. Maybe in the very long term. But, uh, a lot of us are probably going to suffer needlessly in the short-term, and I’m admittedly a bit put out by that.
I think you’re absolutely correct. State powers have spent the last 100 years practicing how to repress their populations and keep them under control. We saw cracks in that power during the rise of social media but it seems like they’re closer to healing those over with each passing day, and once they conquer the digital frontier, their control over our lives and media will be like nothing we’ve seen before.
Yeah… unfortunately there were important lessons that we should not forget. If we are to escape the trap these tyrants are laying for us, it will require a lot of careful political action from us, including new strategies never seen before. We also need to pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t as we develop this strategy.
I would actually disagree. We, as ordinary citizens, are much more aware of the intrusions of authoritarian regimes or institutions into our lives, but by and large, are not exceptionally pressed-upon by them in comparison to past societies.
I would like to emphasize that I am NOT saying “uwu the NSA can take pictures of my asshole when I’m not looking, as a treat 😊”, but that we’re probably not in a particularly different position, in terms of relative ability to observe and escape observation, than past societies.
Fuck governments spying on their citizens, the same way I’d say fuck pre-modern societies spying on their subjects for the benefit of the elites - but bored apparatchiks with phone-taps and program backdoors is a change in form from priestly hierarchies extracting confessions from you and your social circle; and local elders secretly opening and resealing letters and harassing your friends and family into condemning you; not really a change in substance. It’s not so much worse as stretched over a greater geographical area, as is all modern life.
I mean, hell, as late as the early 19th century, “My landlord spied on me through the keyhole” was a perfectly good reason to get executed for sodomy; and as early as Ancient Rome (and probably earlier, tbh) a man’s private conversation with his own family might be used to have his throat cut after a banquet. The means of transmission (overlapping social circles instead of overlapping institutions) is different, but the end result of violation of privacy in service to the politics of the elite (local or national) is the same.
It’s not working, but I can at least see where they’re coming from right? In the not-too-distant past, there was very high inequality and we got the French Revolution and several Communist revolutions. What’s different now?
(My assumption is the state power is much greater now, so regimes like North Korea, Iran, Belarus, etc are able to hold power despite making their people unhappy.)
See, the problem here is that I find ‘where they’re coming from’ as based on fundamentally flawed premises.
For example, before both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution (both February and October/November), the circumstances that led to revolution were not simply “Government is oppressive” - the government had been oppressive for a very long time, and at times much more intensely than at the time of the revolutions. The circumstances and triggers were distinctly aligned along the empowerment of the people - hard-fought-for reforms put revolutionaries and reformers into a position where overthrow of the government was, in the first place, possible - and often begun on terms much more moderate than it would end on.
Imagine if all those on the ‘left’, in the original sense, abstained from participation in the Assembly of Notables, and left it to be a conservative rubber-stamp? Imagine if the restriction and oversight of workers’ organizations in the Russian Empire had made the socialists disengage in participation with them? What revolution would have been possible?
Suffering is not the core element of revolution - if it was, at least a good third of countries (and probably more) in the modern day would be in the process of being overthrown. The power or positioning of those who are dissatisfied is the core element of revolution - and why reforms, even if they fix nothing, are important to any long-term leftist movement.
“If we just make the oppressed suffer a little more, they’ll surely both rise up AND become ideologically aligned with us!” is particularly stupid, considering the already-quite-sparse history of uprisings by oppressed demographics without a fundamental shift in the ideological framework of their society. Generally, they are either unsuccessful, or usher in a “Meet the new boss, same as the old” scenario wherein all that changes is who exactly is in the position of oppressed and oppressor, not a change in the fundamental power dynamics of society.
Dissatisfaction is not education, nor is it inherently inducement to resist. People very often in the history of mankind have submitted to being led to the worst kind of torture and pointless deaths simply because they did not feel themselves in a position of power to resist. It is not the unsupervised prisoners condemned to fates worse than death who overthrow regimes, nor generally the oppressed minorities ready to be tortured to death at a moment’s notice, nor the peasants being hunted down for sport by a chevauchee - it is those who think they have leverage to start with. Desperation can drive a pre-existing revolutionary movement to more drastic action, but it generally does not create revolutionary movements.
I would actually disagree here - the power of the state, in absolute terms, can push repression a bit further, but fundamentally, modern states are more vulnerable to revolutions than states in the past. The cultivation of mass communication and organization means that extremely closed cliques or castes are simply nonviable as a means of maintaining control of the state itself. Without that closed organization, ultimately, while a state can sieve a certain amount of dissent away from security forces by special privileges and background checks, the fact that its protectors and its subjects come from the same stock means that modern states are much more limited in their ability to upset the masses.
Iran is probably the best example of this dynamic - it has to balance feeding extremist propaganda to the population, with projections of strength, and concessions to popular contentment.
If it gave all power to extremist propaganda, the IRGC would effectively run the state - which, other than being displeasing to the clerical fascist class currently ruling, would disincentivize the proper military, the technocrats, and the politicos from cooperation with the state, which would pretty invariably be fatal - either in the form of a coup, or in an inability to resist outside pressure. If it gave all power to projections of strength, then the citizenry’s incentive to cooperate beyond the bare minimum to escape punishment would be eliminated, ironically severely weakening the reality of that strength by reducing the number and quality of those recruited into the security forces and, for that matter, would put the current clerical fascist class at risk of a coup by acknowledging that they have no legitimacy that does not trace back to the security forces. And to give into popular demands - as Iran pointedly did not during the Mahsa Amini protests - would mean a dissolution of the authoritarian state entirely, a revolution with minimal bloodshed, as in post-Franco Spain or the Color Revolutions of Eastern Europe.
For an authoritarian state to last beyond a handful of years, it has to balance all of these factors to prevent both coups and revolutions, whereas generally, pre-modern states only really had to worry about coups insofar as internal dissolution was concerned.
(upvoted for discussion, btw)
Very well said. It feels like every discussion turns into this dichotomy: suffer in the current system or opt out for change. There are times when those truly are the only two options, but that’s absolutely not the rule.
In plenty of cases, exercising the agency you have doesn’t preclude disruption. It’s possible to vote and organize a wildcat strike. It’s possible to attend a peaceful protest and sabotage the tools of a police state.
Unfortunately the polarization of politics has also fractured the entire spectrum. Any action that doesn’t fit the confines of your political identity is automatically useless or counterproductive. This is what gives attitudes that the meme lampoons: blatant accelerationism dressed in mental gymnastics or an emotional appeal.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It’s good to see a hopeful take on the world trajectory!
Hopeful’s a strong word. Maybe in the very long term. But, uh, a lot of us are probably going to suffer needlessly in the short-term, and I’m admittedly a bit put out by that.
I think you’re absolutely correct. State powers have spent the last 100 years practicing how to repress their populations and keep them under control. We saw cracks in that power during the rise of social media but it seems like they’re closer to healing those over with each passing day, and once they conquer the digital frontier, their control over our lives and media will be like nothing we’ve seen before.
Thanks for helping me remember watching Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring fail :-(
Yeah… unfortunately there were important lessons that we should not forget. If we are to escape the trap these tyrants are laying for us, it will require a lot of careful political action from us, including new strategies never seen before. We also need to pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t as we develop this strategy.
I would actually disagree. We, as ordinary citizens, are much more aware of the intrusions of authoritarian regimes or institutions into our lives, but by and large, are not exceptionally pressed-upon by them in comparison to past societies.
I would like to emphasize that I am NOT saying “uwu the NSA can take pictures of my asshole when I’m not looking, as a treat 😊”, but that we’re probably not in a particularly different position, in terms of relative ability to observe and escape observation, than past societies.
Fuck governments spying on their citizens, the same way I’d say fuck pre-modern societies spying on their subjects for the benefit of the elites - but bored apparatchiks with phone-taps and program backdoors is a change in form from priestly hierarchies extracting confessions from you and your social circle; and local elders secretly opening and resealing letters and harassing your friends and family into condemning you; not really a change in substance. It’s not so much worse as stretched over a greater geographical area, as is all modern life.
I mean, hell, as late as the early 19th century, “My landlord spied on me through the keyhole” was a perfectly good reason to get executed for sodomy; and as early as Ancient Rome (and probably earlier, tbh) a man’s private conversation with his own family might be used to have his throat cut after a banquet. The means of transmission (overlapping social circles instead of overlapping institutions) is different, but the end result of violation of privacy in service to the politics of the elite (local or national) is the same.