It does seem that social upheaval tends to happen when material conditions deteriorate to the point when a critical mass of people that starts to see their situation as being unbearable. Originally, Marx and Engels speculated that socialist revolutions would occur in advanced capitalist societies, but they proved to be the most resilient.
When presented with a choice, people will generally choose the path of least resistance. People change when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.
Happy individuals can help work towards a revolution, definitely, but two things required for a successful revolution are often horrifying conditions that lead people to want to overthrow the existing order and an organizational framework that allows for the proper decisionmaking to happen necessary for a revolution.
Don’t underestimate the power of propaganda, for one. And for another, remember that the hardest part of any revolution is the organizing and logistics while under threat of the existing power. Whether a person is desperate for anything different or doing decently well but believes in better, the planning has to be there. And things can go wrong even with a plan and require adjustment. A lot of what I’m saying is basics that can be seen even in capitalist military thinking; the main difference being that in a socialist/communist revolution, the goal is not to mold people into drones for a cause that benefits their masters, but to empower them to stand with each other for a better life for everyone.
People want their needs met consistently and will only go along with so much if they can’t eat, but we can see that when they’re in a more middling area of things, they can be made to think what they have is better than it is, or as good as it gets. It’s dark, but look at how some people in the US have been lied to about alternatives; they’ll readily agree things aren’t exactly amazing, but struggle to admit a better world is possible, much less through a historically tested means like communism. Because their view of it has been warped by propaganda, to see it as something that is always worse. This from the government that did MKUltra, tried to literally mind control people. It shouldn’t be a surprise they have some effectiveness in tricking their own citizenry. And this is part of what communists have to contend with, even if the degree of deception is not the same in every capitalist-dominated country. A desperate enough person who believes aliens have taken over isn’t going to start a communist revolution; they’re going to do something wild and unpredictable. What a person believes does matter. They don’t have to be a full blown communist to back a working class movement, but they can’t be thinking it’s the worst thing ever either or they’ll cave the first time slander comes out about it, if they are even willing to risk anything for it at all in the first place.
I disagree. At one point, it’s not that all people are being brainwashed, though educated and conditioned, but that now, especially in the Global North, it becomes a license for them to feel good about their social position, that is dependent on capitalism.
They may see the system as the source of their wealth or current lifestyle, as a last resort of ‘rationality’
But why would they feel good about their social position? A lot of them aren’t even doing that well - but then you see that phenomenon of like how that one person put it (forget their name offhand), the quote about “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” where people sort of see themselves more as part of the ruling class, but someone who just hasn’t “made it” yet through some fault of their own. I’m not saying it’s 100% brainwashing superimposed over people’s living conditions, without any interplay between the two, but surely they aren’t organically coming to a state of mind such as that. It’s one thing for them to be afraid of worse if they have relative comfort. It’s another for them to believe they can be rich any day now if they just work it out through the right “individual choices”.
In case it’s not clear, I’m not here arguing that propaganda is the defining factor. Just that it’s not one that should be underestimated as an influence over things. I mean, the US has been wielding it for decades, alongside other tools, to help carry out color revolutions the world over. There are limits to it, but countries that want to guard against that take narrative control seriously for a reason.
The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. [6] We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.
None of this is meant to downplay the scale of the propaganda project. I’ve spent enough time chasing down leads on different intelligence fronts and their plots to know that they are real and have real effects. [7] I do not deny that the outcomes we observe are at all times incentivized and enforced both overtly and covertly by our various societal superstructures (police, education, culture) and that principled and effective truth-tellers have been assassinated. I reject only the common misconception that propaganda “manufactures consent” (Chomsky) or “invents reality” (Parenti), because it exaggerates the feat accomplished by propagandists, and, in doing so, it obscures the real material basis that has historically made even the working poor in the imperial core complicit.
This argument comes across to me as kind of reductionist to the point at hand. I can only assume in the best of faith that it makes more sense in context. I have not ascribed to people in the imperial core as a general rule “utter stupidity and naivety” or “moral innocence” either one. Furthermore, I don’t understand how someone is supposed to “instinctively understand that they benefit as a class from exploitation” if they literally don’t understand that others have to be exploited in order for things to be functioning the way they are going. If they understand and don’t care, they’re complicit sure, but I don’t see how it can be simplified to throwing them all into the same bin as being in the same position about it. To use myself as an example for reference, the best I can remember of being lib anyway, I don’t think I saw myself as someone who was part of exploitation and felt it was okay at all. I think what I thought was something along the lines of “the world has problems, but the people in power are doing their best to fix it.” I’d characterize the understanding I had at certain points as almost childlike in its simplicity (like how we talk about people having “marvel brain” of good vs. evil). So in my case, you might say there was a degree of naivete at certain points, but this is not to say it was like that the entire time in every way. At some point, I started developing an anti-capitalist view, which came before I developed an anti-imperialist one; without the right information, I don’t know how I would have done differently. In an observing sense of things, what I was able to witness firsthand was harm that was more personal and relevant to the country I live in. Information outside of the country largely got reframed as something vastly different than what it is. Now that I can see it, it’s wild to look at how thoroughly they DARVO everything about other countries. But I don’t know if I could have reasoned it out without the right information and influences. Until I started reading theory, probably the best framework I had was trying to “think critically”, which in practice, was alright on a small scale of things, but suffered greatly in accuracy due to being too much based on trying to universalize principles in the abstract rather than being able to put things in their historical and present context.
I don’t think any of this is incompatible with the point that people can be reasoned with, but I do think they need strong influences that can break through and they need a framework that can functionally understand what is actually going on. When it comes to the ones who sort of do get it, but are callous anyway, I’m not sure if they are as worth the energy. People can be in many different places and it won’t all happen the same.
Also, perhaps I have an incorrect understanding of the term compared to how it is intended, but I’ve usually taken the term “manufactures consent” not to mean that most expressly, with full understanding, agree with the policy being carried out, but more of consent in the legal sense that if one person is attacking other and you quietly observe and don’t intervene, it may be viewed as you consenting to the act being carried out. Certainly there are the people who go to the full point of rabid support (I see them online on a regular basis) but in RL and even online in random non-political places, I don’t seem to encounter these people in the same way; maybe they are there and I’m unaware, but I more often get the sense of low information than full information with complicity. Which is not to be confused with naivete or stupidity. It’s not naive or stupid if you don’t know the prediction is that it’s going to rain tomorrow, you are just ignorant of the information. By the time much of information about other countries reaches the busier, less news-heavy people, it may be all the more simplified and removed from context.
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Well, if you wanna understand what I’m talking about, granted this is about those in the Global North, here’s an article
I’ll try to read it at some point.
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To have some revolutionary potential, you need to see the injustice in the world. You don’t have to directly experience this injustice to see it, which is why John Brown is such a cool motherfucker.
At the other end of the “change” spectrum, the royal family in the UK do some charity work to “change” things. Maybe they do believe that people shouldn’t starve, but system change is against their material interests.
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Maybe I can add my personal experience on this. Looking at my own life, I could say I am pretty happy and comfortable. I have a stable job, a stable income, a place to live I can afford, a healthy relationship, a good family and a good group of friends. If I were to only look at myself I could see no need for a revolution.
But I don’t just look at myself. I look around and see many that don’t have what I have and I think that is unfair. I think it is unfair that a select group of people who are richer than 99% of us get to make the decisions that ruin other people’s lives and the planet. And I think that we should do something about that.
So is it unhappiness that drives me? No, I think you should rather call it a drive for justice.
I’m in a similar situation here as well. To expand on that a bit, it’s not only unfair that a select few people are the primary beneficiaries of how our economy is organized, but it’s also the fact that these people decide how resources and labor are allocated. Even having a comfortable lifestyle under capitalism robs people of having any meaning in their labor, because its sole purpose is to generate profit. Many jobs that exist have no social value, and some are actively harmful to society.
But then again yes unhappy people are by far the majority of people in the revolution I think
I know that being unhappy (as an individual) can lead to inhibition. Procrastination, addiction, escapism, doomerism etc. “Happy people” (whatever that means) do change things and are interested in change, but not necessarily in revolution.
I think a revolution can only happen if some people are so miserable that they have nothing to lose. Because the amount of people who aren’t miserable, and are still willing to sacrifice their comfort to help working towards a goal greater than themselves is pretty low.
Is it more important to focus on the former or the latter type? idk!
