this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
77 points (85.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43901 readers
1647 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's kinda weird though that some people call for violent revolutions over what amounts to semantics.
Sadly, history has taught us, that there are only very few revolutions that end up with a more liberal political system. The Zaparistas are the first instance where I heard of something like that, and I am not nearly informed enough on the specifics of their system and how it works out in real-life to comment on them.
All other revolutions that I know about usually ended with a Robespierre, a Lenin/Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao Zedong or any of the hundreds of military dictatorships that came into power over the last century.
Not many people are able to first amass enough power to be stronger than the regular government and then idealistic enough to let go of all that power again.
I agree that there are a lot of revolutions ending up way more totalitarian than planned.
I'm not sure there are hundreds of them that had communism or a stateless society as a goal though. Many military dictatorships had a military dictatorship as a goal after all. But of course there were also many who had that goal, and failed on a huge scale.
There were more revolutions than just the Zapatistas that seemed to be promising though, like the Spanish Revolution and the the Makhnovshchina.
You are right, of course, that most revolutions don't have communism as their goal.
But all successful ones lead to totalitarian states.
I find it difficult to judge the Zapatistas, same as the Spanish Revolution and the Makhovshchina, since they all nevever matured (or in the chase of the Zapatistas haven't matured yet).
Generally speaking, during a revolution, the revolutionists (is that a word?) promise the people everything, because they need to gather support. Once they have driven out the old power/government and actually control the area, they usually tend to shift. This pattern occurs not only for communist revolutions, but for all types of revolution.
Generally speaking "Support me becoming a totalitarian dictator" isn't really a good rallying call.
I'm not saying it can't happen, only that it consistently hasn't happened so far.