Revolutions are long-term work. They are not nor ever have been overnight affairs throughout history.
Now there's an adage attributed to everyone's favoritr 20th century revolutionary actor: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
These are to be taken into account together. Don't mistake those weeks as separate or independent from the decades.
Sounds like something we're supposed to hear in order to not rise up. I know I've been waiting a while and it sucks to see the young generation going through the same hoops.
I'll just keep waiting till someone actually needs help building a gallows or something
Too many people see compromise as a weakness and it's destroying democracy which is built on this very principle that all different kinds of people have to come together and make laws to create a common denominator.
But for some reason political parties today catch flak left and right if they compromise on some of their positions in order to achieve at least a bit of progress instead of being unyielding on it but not changing anything since noone else would agree on it.
Imho that's one of the reasons why populist parties today gain so much ground: the very act of compromise is seen as weak by many and they capitalize on that to attack the other parties
The shifting of the Overton window is real and an important part of the American Republican playbook.
However the above commenter is not talking about American Republicans, they're talking about the purity culture among leftists that prevents them from voting for left leaning liberals.
In the current election the choices are 1 step to the left or 50 yards to the right, and because it's not 2 steps to the left they refuse to vote.
Martin wouldn't have won without Malcolm. And he wouldn't have won if he spent all his time yelling at Malcom to calm down instead of fighting for civil rights.
You can say you want slow incremental change because you think we have plenty of time. (Most will disagree with you tho, cuz you're wrong)
But if you spend your time fighting against progress rather than making sure at least some progress is made...
We're going to spend more time backsliding than slowly walking up hill.
Go up the hill too fast and you just get there a little early, backslide too much and you can fall all the way to the bottom, break your leg, and never be able to climb back up.
I read this post as being about Malcolm. He kept the pressure going his entire life. He always kept organizing and kept the pressure going. Really I think what this is encouraging people to do is to look more towards Malcolm X than to Marcus Garvey. Look for the true anarchists, not for the people who want to redo capitalism but this time their group is on top, because that shits how you get Israel genociding Palestine
This is kind of a garbage take. Revolution is just one puzzle piece in the large set of tools necessary to effect real change. Revolution can also happen in many different ways from silent to political to violent. And all of those can very much happen overnight if all the pieces are in the right place.
I think (I hope) by overnight revolution, they mean the tipping point from civil unrest into actual change. It took a decade of protesting for Civil Rights to get popular support, but the law was drafted, written, and signed in less than a week due to the destruction wrought across the country after MLK was assassinated.
Right? If China and Russia are anything to go by, I want none of that revolution. They still have garbage governance even today. I'm convinced a revolution would get us from shit to absolute vile hot diarrhea.
I think I prefer trying to change the diet instead, just to stick to the metaphor.
Sure, but it would be more convenient if other people organized a revolution that leads to me being able to hunt in the morning, shitpost communist memes in the afternoon, and smoke weed and masturbate in the evening.
From what I've seen, big upswells in revolutionary activity tend to correspond with sharp plunges in national prosperity. The COVID epidemic and subsequent mass layoffs put hundreds of thousands of people into the streets on a regular basis. Before that, the Great Recession kicked off a flood people on the streets of major metro areas. Then the mini-recession of 2014, combined with a ratcheting of police violence, sent another wave of protesters out.
But these conditions eventually reversed themselves, unemployment rates fell back to pre-recession levels, and the risk of police violence started to look like it outweighed street protests and organizing efforts for large swaths of the population.
The suggestion that people are just lazy and won't do any organizing seems contrary to reality. People organize quickly and easily when they've got nothing better to do. Its when they're drawn back into the job market, when they start seeing their economic situation recover, and when they feel like they have a bit more to lose that revolutionary action devolves into the kind of shitposting you can do from an office desk or during a long commute on a cell phone.
Incidentally, this isn't something political leadership is unaware of, either. Low unemployment is a policy goal of the state precisely because it corresponds with lower crime rates, less public protest, and fewer insurgent political campaigns to unseat the incumbents.