A lot of social justice type people really like the idea of The Revolution. Someday, they say, we will smash white supremacy/capitalism/patriarchy/the state! And then everything will be perfect and rainbows and sunshine and Kumbaya!
Fortunately, this never really gets beyond reblogging “If I Had A Hammer I’d Smash The Patriarchy” pictures, but nevertheless I feel like this is an extremely destructive tendency that needs to be nipped in the bud before people start building barricades.
Imagine that social justice is like climbing mountains. You want to walk to the top of the tallest mountain because… I don’t know, it’s there. But, instead of a normal human, you are a video game character with two powers: Walk and Jump.
If you use Walk, you move to the next square on the board. It’s pretty easy to get to the top of a mountain that way: all you have to do is keep going up. Even if you make a mistake, it’s easy to move back to where you were. Unfortunately, the mountain you’re trying to climb on might not be the tallest mountain in the mountain range.
On the other hand, you can use Jump. If you use Jump, you land on literally any other square on the board. Jump has a chance of putting you in a better position. Of course, a lot of squares are lower than where you started out, especially if you’re pretty high up the mountain already. Even worse, sometimes when you Jump you break your legs and then you can’t move at all.
Trying to reform the system– starting a women’s shelter, agitating for better food stamps laws, educating your friends about racism, whatever– is using Walk. A world without a woman’s shelter is worse than a world with a women’s shelter. It’s still horrible; if it wasn’t horrible, we wouldn’t need a woman’s shelter. But it’s a little better.
Revolutions use Jump. Sometimes revolutions are awesome and you end up with the United States and a democracy instead of a king! But a lot of the time revolutions end up as Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, or the Khmer Rouge. I mean, sure, you don’t think that your plan to smash the state will lead to mass starvation and murder, but neither did the people who supported Stalin. He did not get into power because he promised to put dissidents into gulags.
I’ll take “guaranteed to be a little better” over “chance that it’s way better, chance of gulags” any day.
The other problem with revolutionary thinking is that it tends to blind people to the stuff that can improve the world right now. A lot of revolutionaries nowadays don’t really have a plan for how the revolution is going to come about, except “everybody talk about revolutionary theory a lot.” To be fair, this is a much better plan than “let’s accidentally make Stalinist Russia,” since discussing revolutionary theory is an entertaining hobby that is unlikely to hurt anyone. But it doesn’t help people either.
One more rape crisis center or one more person educated about good consent and respecting boundaries seems like such a small victory when compared to a world without rape. But we know how to achieve the former and have no idea how to achieve the latter (except that it possibly involves dancing). Energy directed towards “let’s make a world without rape!” is wasted unless it causes actual changes in the actual world that we live in.
100% agree.
The world has been moving slowly towards better throughout history. We’ll get there eventually, and a little faster for every little bit of good any individual manages to put out in the world.
Thank you. I hate people who base their idea of social justice on revolution. In addition to the things that you mention here, it’s also incredibly lazy. I associate it with people who want to be able to have their one big revolution and go home to live in their utopia of justice.
But democracy doesn’t work that way. The revolution is the easy part. The day after is when the hard work starts. Democracy requires a lot of niggling, frustrating compromises and meetings and bureaucracy. It’s not sexy the way your poster of Che Guevara is. Sometimes it’s downright ugly, because in order to make things better for some people, you’re going to have to make common cause with other people that you don’t completely agree with. Just societies don’t come about when you guillotine the king; they come about from long, boring meetings about appropriations of funds and redistricting, and how you count the population for political representation and so on.
I think that a lot of the popularity of revolutionary models comes from the way that masculinity eroticizes dying with your boots on. The idea of getting gunned down by counter-revolutionary forces is a beautiful, romantic image, much beloved by adolescents of all genders. Being the guy taking the minutes for a committee meeting to get funds to a shelter? Not so much. But justice is more likely to come from striving to live than looking for a romantic death.
Again totally agree. I have met a fair amount of so caled revolutionaries (usually some flavour of leninist socialist types) who see any attempt to make things better within the system that already exists as almost treachery to The Cause. Whatever that may be. To the point where any attempt to make life any better for people with smaller steps is kind of sneered at, and at best gets a “aww aren’t you cute, it will never work” response. While they are doing what? Sitting on their (generally massively overprivileged) bums while other people suffer and they theorise away in an armchair. Think it comes from that idea of an intellectual vanguard of basically white humanities students leading the ignorant proles into some kind of utopian future.
That said I could definitely do better myself to be more active, internet rants don’t really count, but I am hoping i can do that through doctor-work iA once I get a bit further along. Feels like a duty to use that privilege productively.
Oh goodness yes absolutely. Some people I know respond to every discussion with “after the feminist revolution that won’t be a problem” or “after the queer revolution….” or “trans revolution” or whatever revolution (my dad says “libertarian revolution”!) And I always want to just say yeah, whatever, but what can we do now, even if it is a small step, even if it isn’t much.
Incidentally, even the American revolution was not necessarily all that great….some populations were definitely not better off (arguably, some were worse off.)
I totally agree; I think rebellion is more important than revolution.
But I’m skeptical about moral progress.
> Incidentally, even the American revolution was not necessarily all that great…
Native American here. Yeah, you can keep it.
This whole thing is spurious. Social justice is not like climbing a mountain, where the default state is “bottom” and the goal is “get to a higher place for some unfathomable reason.” People don’t just happen to be on the bottom for no reason, and they aren’t struggling against impersonal natural forces to change their position.
It’s a lot more like this: At some point, some group somewhere decides they can do better for themselves at the expense of some other group. They work out a way of making that happen. Sometimes it even works; the coalition they built manages to prevail over the folks at whose expense this is meant to occur, and manages to hold on during the critical period when those for whom it was not always this way are still around to try and make trouble. Eventually, if they hang on long enough, they can make it seem like it’s always been that way.
Social justice is like trying to go from a situation where that’s been the case a long time, to one where that’s no longer the case, while struggling against the many local and small-scale obstacles the now-dominant group has placed in the way of that — direct use of force, passive and active penalization of disruptive behavior, very biased definitions of “disruptive” that favor the status quo, control over images and ideas which form our worldviews, etc — and doing so while having all the usual range of human flaws and frailties that everyone has.
No shit it’s complicated. No shit revolutions have bad side effects. So does reform. What do you do when the situation your in offers no real potential for reform? Should North Koreans just lobby their legislators? Should Native Americans ask white folks nicely to consider knocking this shit off? Sometimes revolutionary or disruptive behavior is the only way to even get reform onto the table. MLK didn’t suggest black people leave it at writing letters to their congressional representatives and appealing to white Americans’ sense of decency — because they’d already tried that and it didn’t work. (And look what paltry gains were made even after the Civil Rights movement — it took civil disobedience, riots and countless other actions to get anything done at all, and it was still very little in the grand scheme of things…)
To get reform, all too often you have to aim for revolution anyway — at least in the eyes of the powers that be. And not all revolutons look like “violently overthrow the government and replace it”, either.
Yes. Thank you Ozzy! Think about the assholes who want to prevent needle exchange because it’s more “important”. Because making it safer might make it harder to ban drugs all together.
Or look at the even bigger assholes who don’t want pregnancy prevention programs because *reducing* unwanted pregnancies might reduce abortion rates to a point no ody cares… And the want it banned 100% or, I guess, not at all.
Even bigger assholes in that oppose legalizing sex work or even “harm reduction” because if women aren’t at constant risk of murder, assault, or disease they might not be terrorized out of going into it. Or jeopardized I to leaving it.
And for all of them little steps are never good enough. Or even worth it. It’s all jump or nothing at all.
#%^*$&@!
tfl
First of all, I note that ‘revolutionary’ theory often seems rather divorced from actual revolutions. The word is sometimes just used to refer to norms, practices, or lifestyles that are stigmatized and have at least some value. (often combined with the idea that the Patriarchs will look upon xer queerness and despair.)
Second, I don’t know of any time there has actually been a revolution that was more about individual people’s relationships than about political leadership, and the revolutions that are less specifically about which individual people or cohesive communities are currently in power (i.e. Communist revolutions, etc) seem to be the most likely to go REALLY, REALLY BADLY. (Although I’m not sure about the Nationalist revolutions in Europe that predated WW1)
Third, all plans must include within them the ability to be enacted. Some people think that in 1917 Lenin was all like ‘ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL’ and then everybody acted as one. Or, worse, they think that just some theorizing and a belief that the conditions in the world are bad enough is sufficient to make people act as a cohesive force, regardless of whether they feel like the new boss’s philosophy fits their needs.
Another thing that I’ve noticed is that some people tend to assume that the whole oppression thing is the *entire* core of society, and they assume the following: 1. There is no reason why they should not just destroy everything, 2. Anybody who defends current society does it only out of loyalty to the Oppressors, 3. They can help by attacking things that don’t seem directly connected to major oppression or acting in ways that seem blatantly un-utilitarian, 4. A pre-fab trasitional government (or replacement social norms, or whatever) is not going to be needed, or will meet with no opposition, or just following your very narrow in-group culture will be right for everyone. Feminisn’t complained about the expectation of sex work activists to be capitalism-smashing ur-leftists.
This cluster of beliefs unfortunately seem to be common both among people who focus on intersectionality (an idea which, while true, seems to be rather risky.)
Also seems worryingly connected to the whole eternal underdog thing.
Hm, I actually thought people only used phrases as “after the trans/feminist/anti-racist/whatever revolution…” slightly jokingly.
To actually think there could be revolutions in such areas seem down-right confused. A socialist revolution is at least concievable (not saying “a good idea”, just concievable) since the economic power is mostly held by fairly few people, people who aren’t politicians and can’t just be voted off their posts, so one might imagine the masses somehow wrestling that power from the minority. But HBT issues, feminist issues, racist issues and so on are already in the hands of the majority. This kind of oppression is mostly informal rather than enforced by laws and rules. If the social justice movement managed to persuade the majority of the population of their views, these kinds of oppression would melt away, i e, reform (and what little formal oppression there is – such as laws regulating the lives of HBT people differently from hetero-cis people – would most likely be gotten rid of if the majority of the population were firmly against such laws). On the other hand, if only a minority holds strong pro-trans/feminist/anti-racist/whatever views – HOW exactly would one go about forcing the majority to accept these views? It’s not just that I can’t figure out how to perform a GOOD revolution with a good result in these areas – I can’t figure out how to perform a revolution at all.
Hmmm….
Version One: Marxist/anarchist boilerplate and assume everything comes out okay (you will have handed the game to your enemies because they are capable of coordinating and intrigue).
More realistically:
-Any kind of social change can be instituded with the right combination of coercion and propaganda.
- If you gained a lot of power somehow, you can institute policies helpful to your group.
- I suspect that a few generations of extremely high intensity affirmative action might possibly be capable of eliminating a lot of the structural racism problems in the US. However, reactions against this idea would make it very risky.
- There are quite a few bastions that could be attacked for benefits, (and you would probably attack them even if your thinking was not revolutionary). For example, you could use intrigue and propaganda, or any other workable method, to screw up the Republican Party or organized religions. This is often more applicable to countries where things haven’t got as far.
- However, I don’t think that quasi-revolutionaries really think about the above.
@Engineer Krause: Thanks.
Although there would probably be a fairly large risk of your propaganda and affirmative action back-firing if you took over the state by force. Like, white hetero-cis-people considering POC, HBT and so on to be evil people in league with the dictatorship. You’d have to be pretty skilled in propaganda to pull it off.
Agreed. Part of my point is that quasi-revolutionaries don’t really seem to *get* intrigue, and while they do sometimes engage in ‘direct action’ (i.e. criminal coercion) against enemies their revolutionary-ness is not focused at any of these things and is more about discourse and playing the role. (Note Occupy’s failure to create victory conditions and various other issues).
Point taken.
Maybe we should agree on a definition of revolution before discussing further, and what counts as revolution vs what counts as reform? I didn’t want to imply that it’s never justified or rational to commit illegal acts in order to reach your goals. I think that might sometimes be a very good idea. It’s just that I don’t think illegal=revolutionary.
I think the distinction is between saying “I have this idea that might make these few things better” and “everything will be better for everyone when we totally change everything”. “Reform” and “revolution” are quite broad terms and seem to be dependent on how you frame a society’s structure and what needs to change.
So Egypt throwing out Mubarak would be a revolutionary act to many, since they got rid of a corrupt dictator who was responsible, or at least representative of many problems, but to, say, hardcore anarchists it would be little more than reforming a broken system, since the state and capitalism were not dismantled in the process.
I don’t know… sometimes revolutions are needed to clear out the old. I mean, sometimes the regime in power is so horrible and oppressive that the only chance of better life is a revolution. To use Ozy’s analogy: sometimes the mountain decides to throw landslides and boulders all around you, to the point that it’s impossible to get anywhere by walking, and the only choice you have is to sit still doing nothing or take the chance and jump.
I predict that there will be some kind of revolution in China sometime in the future. However, western countries are doing things smartly these days: they give their citizens just enough freedom, just enough entertainment to keep the masses happy, or they take away our rights so incrementally that we don’t seem to notice. People are less likely to revolt when you ensure that at least most people get food and a place to live in and a decent income. Even if on the other hand the government is trampling their rights, taking away freedoms, or building an Orwellian dystopia…
I don’t have all the answers, and I’m not saying we should all just descend to anarchy and throw out our governments. I still have hope for democracy, but that hope is mainly focused on more direct forms of democracy, with less possibilities for sociopaths to game the system, less lobbying and corporacracy. If the power was divided to a hugely larger amount of people, it would be increasingly hard for corporations to bribe the government, because they’d have to spend way more money.
All in all, I think we’re (we as in the world) going to need change, and at some point revolutions may become necessary – but I hope they can be peaceful revolutions, the kind where all the people would just tell the politicians “no, we don’t want your BS anymore, let’s do things another way now”.
Yeah… My view of it is along the lines of ‘Are we having fun yet?’ Also, I think that anarchists often are falling into the trap of other-optimizing and should just leave.
- North Korea’s govt. getting overthrown is a specifically political revolution that has a victory condition and a reasonable chance of not going completely pear-shaped. Could conceivably be annexed by S. Korea which might be good, or could go badly. The other issue is different, but it too is a very different situation from vague social-issue quasi-revolutionism.
I’m firmly on your side on this one, but what you’re describing is the hill-climbing algorithm, and it has a major known flaw — it tends to get stuck in “local maxima”. That is, you’re on a smaller peak, and you can see there’s a higher peak nearby, but you can’t get to it because that would mean walking downhill for a bit.
In computer science there are some solutions to this — one of the simplest is to remember where you were, randomly jump somewhere else and climb for a bit, and see if it’s any better. If not, return to where you were. But that’s a little easier said than done when it comes to actual political systems!
Luckily we have something that computer algorithms don’t — insight. We can compare and contrast systems across the world, and across history, and reason about how effective they’ve proven to be. And so you can jump, but only if you’ve got a good idea of where you’re going to end up.
This, For many reasons. One of the ways which “revolutionary” inclinations has left me frustrated in my personal life is in the art and storytelling world, where you’re either “for the cause” or… Just part of the rest of the irrelevant, escapist masses of creators. I can’t submit my work to queer venues because I don’t create work that’s explicitly about the queer experience. And so on and so forth. I looked into getting myself listed on Prism Comics’ website, and I realized that my application would be denied because my comic is too busy being -other genres- (like, say a sci-fan, psychedelic, political thriller). I could make the case that this is a queer, asexual world, but that’s stupid. I shouldn’t have to argue for that. I’m a queer creator making shit featuring characters that I can relate to. But no, that’s too pedestrian. A bad case of “not X enough”.
I don’t think revolutions are all bad or all good (wow, obvious statement is obvious), but I do think that the term is severely over-applied by people who have no idea what would actually, physically be involved with one.
Like, what exactly happens in a feminist revolution? Don’t tell me what it would be like afterwards, don’t tell me about paradigmatic changes, tell me what I would actually see people doing. Is there going to be shooting? New leaders voted in? Big protests and then the government changes some laws? Some sexist guys get physically attacked and men start treating women better after that? A bunch of women go live in communes with no men? A bunch of really important books written at once? Is it just a metaphor for a gradual process of change in the culture? Or will there be refugees?
I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer to what these revolutions are actually supposed to look like.
It seems to me like a lot of the time, when people talk about “the revolution” it’s just a wish-fulfillment fantasy – “One day, all the people who disagree with me will magically and unambiguously be proven wrong, and I will ascend to utopia on a golden elevator while smiling smugly because I was right all along. And then there will be unicorns! And an endless supply of fuzzy kittens that never need feeding and don’t shed on the furniture!” I’m definitely not saying this is always the case, but I think it’s true of a lot of “revolutionaries”.
SpudTater: Yes– I briefly glossed over that, but I probably could have made that point more clearly.
here here — gradual, but real, change and keep redesigning possible changes for the future.
I think the key difference between a political revolution in say North Korea and an anti-kyriarchical revolution in a more open, developed nation, which other people have alluded to, is made clearest by SpudTater’s hill climbing algorithm frame.
Namely, when you can *actually observe* higher, distant peaks in the optimal society landscape – because they exist either historically or elsewhere in the world – making radical leaps toward them, even if it involves some downhill movement in the short term, is justified. You know that the utopia* you’re headed for is completely achievable.
On the other hand, when you’re already at the current observed global maximum in the landscape (or something close to it), and you want a revolution to achieve a better society that you can imagine but doesn’t yet have a model in reality – that’s a lot dicier. People are complicated. Society is complicated. Its extremely had to make radical changes that don’t have lots of unintended consequences. The Kryiarchy is to me usefully treated as an active, intelligent, malevolent force, such is its ability to subvert noble ideas and causes into yet another set of tools of oppression.
~~~
* utopia relative to your existing society, that is.
Also (now that I’m not stuck on my touch-screen phone) hooray for creeping incrementalism!
figleaf
I don’t think it’s just coincidence that those I’ve observed in the social justice movement who are most inclined to talk seriously about The Revolution are also those who are least inclined to play well with others, both in social justice and in the mainstream. I also don’t think it’s coincidental that their ideas about the path from present to revolution to utopia are so vague. To my mind, a lot of talk about revolution in the social justice community is less about actually accomplishing revolutionary social change and more about providing an emotional release valve, a sense that things will improve even if it doesn’t look like it now. In this respect it has at least as much in common with Premillennial Dispensationalism as with Lenin, Mao Zedong, or George Washington. This apocalyptic strain of thought gives the impression that things are going to get better to those who have despaired of incremental change; needless to say, it appeals more to those who consider themselves heavily marginalized, whether because of their socio-economic position or the extremity of their views. This same extremism and unwillingness to play ball with others pushes the notion of revolution further into the pipe dream category, since real revolutions (violent or velvet) require coalition-building on a large scale. Twisty Faster is no Vaclav Havel.
That said, I agree with several of the above commenters that it’s hard to talk about revolutionary rhetoric when the term “revolution” is so broad and ill-defined. I’m not comfortable saying that incremental social change is categorically preferable to revolutionary social change, though I think in the majority of cases it is.
The problem using only reform is that somethings cant be changed by reform. And to all the ppl bashing revolution: was is wrong for the people of Libya to revolt against Gaddafi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadaffi)?
A single issue focused revolutionary thinking can actually lead to sidelining of other important struggles too. Some arguments against Ozy’s work on men’s issues I saw a while ago were along the lines of “but fixing women’s problems will make everything better for men, why waste time on that?” as if there were a magical single step towards gender equality which didn’t include changing male gender roles at all, or as if helping individual men was useless.
I’ve known cispeople who have said that there would be no need to transition when gender roles are truely fluid, so transpeople are “wasting time” and “opting out” of the struggle. So much privileged awful.