Why Don’t We Revolt More Often?

I posted on this a couple of months ago but let me return to the question – with a rather fuller set of suggested reading. It is, of course, a variant of the question I confronted at University – namely why we obey. This, I learned, was answered by Max Weber in his talk about government “legitimacy” gained from one of three traditions, ”charismatic”, “traditional” and “rational-legal”. We obey because we consider the government is legitimate. When questions begin about its legitimacy, that’s the beginning of the end. That’s what happened in the countries of the eastern bloc in autumn and winter 1989. And that’s the situation currently in the US. 

If it was communism that people in the East were rebelling against in the 1980s. 

In America these days it’s Fascism.

Recommended Reading.

• Discussion Guide for Practical Radicals Deepak Bagharva and Stephanie Luce (2023) 

A highly recommended, short (just over 100 pages) guide – with lots of bullet points

• Revolution, rebellion, resistance – the power of story Eric Selbin (2021) 
  

  • In particular,  by using the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, it is possible 

  • to identify and illuminate four basic stories of revolution which show up in a 

  • surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. 

  • These four stories are the Civilizing and Democratizing story of revolution, the 

  • Social Revolution story, the Freedom and Liberation story, and the Lost and 

  • Forgotten story.

  People without Power – the war on populism and the fight for democracy  Thomas Frank

  • One name scholars have applied to this tradition is the “elitist theory of democracy.” 

  •  It holds that public policy should be made by a “consensus of elites” rather than by 

  • the emotional and deluded people. It regards mass protest movements as outbreaks 

  • of irrationality. Marginalized people, it assumes, are marginalized for a reason. 

  • The critical thing in a system like ours, it maintains, is to allow members of  the 

  • professional political class to find consensus quietly, harmoniously, and without too 

  • much interference from subaltern groups. The obvious, objective fact that the 

  • professional political class fails quite frequently is regarded in this philosophy as 

  • uninteresting if not impossible. When anti-populists have occasion to mention the 

  • elite failures of recent years—deindustrialization, financial crisis, opioid epidemic, 

  • everything related to the 2016 election—they almost always dismiss them as inevitable. 

  • If only it were possible, they sigh, to dissolve the people and elect another.

  Revolutions – how they changed history and what they mean today ed Furtado (2020) 

  • The aim of this book is to look at revolutions around the world and through history: 

  • not only at their causes, crises and outcomes, but also, for the more distant events, 

  • at their long-term legacies and their changing, sometimes contested meanings today. 

  • Historians, mostly native of or active within those societies, have been asked to reflect 

  • on the following questions: What were the essential causes of the revolution? 

  • What narrative of events, protagonists and ideologies is most commonly accepted? 

  • What impact is it believed to have had? What legacy does it have today in national 

  • self-perception and values? Has this changed significantly over past decades?

• Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads – technological change and the future of politics 

• Carles Boix (2019)

Technological pessimists foresee a brave new world where, once artificial intelligence makes its final breakthrough into the so- called “singularity moment,” workers will become completely redundant or will draw, at most, a meager salary. Sitting at the top of a mass of unemployed and underemployed individuals, there will be a small creative class— a thin layer of inventors, top managers, and highly educated professionals— enjoying the benefits of automation and globalization. The system of democratic capitalism that has so far prevailed in the advanced world will crumble under the weight of so much economic inequality. Policy makers will not be able to reconcile free markets with representative elections and deliver both economic growth and a generous welfare state in the way they did during the better part of the twentieth century. The new technologies of information and communication invented in Silicon Valley will take us back to the contentious politics of nineteenth- century capitalism, finally vindicating Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, predicted the eventual substitution of machines for workers, the immiserization of the masses, and the collapse of capitalism at the hands of a horde of angry men, armed with pitchforks and torches, marching down on the wealthy few— now huddled in their Manhattan and Bay Area mansions.

On the other side of the aisle, technological optimists concede that automation will disrupt the labor market and hurt the wages of the least educated, alienating them from politics and elections. That “process of industrial mutation”, to employ Schumpeter’s renowned words, “incessantly revolutionize[d] the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”— modifying the relationship between capital and labor, the patterns of employment, and the distribution of income over time (Schumpeter 1950, 83). In doing so, it periodically generated a (changing) number of critical political challenges that were then met with a particular set of policy responses.

The same logic applies to today’s technological innovations. Because they have already heightened economic inequality and may result in an even more extensive robotization of substantial numbers of (low- and semiskilled) jobs, they could put an end to the broad social consensus around democracy and capitalism that prevailed during most of the twentieth century— particularly in the advanced world. That does not necessarily mean, however, that they will— and that they will make us travel back in time to the nineteenth century, when the industrial capitalism invented in

Manchester and its cotton factories turned out to be incompatible with the construction of fully democratic institutions. The reason is simple. The growing economic and political tensions we are witnessing today are happening in very affluent societies: their average per capita incomes are more than ten times higher than at the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution. So much wealth, jointly with the presence of stable democratic institutions and relatively well structured bureaucracies, should give us much more maneuvering room than any generations before us ever had to respond to the technological and economic challenges of today. Therefore, the task ahead of us is to think about how to harness those economic and institutional assets to the advantage of the many.

Rules for Revolutionaries – how big organizing can change everything B Bond and Z Exley 

(2016) Basically the tools used on the Bernie Sanders campaigns

• Beautiful Trouble – a toolbox for revolution ed Andrew Boyd (2012) Highly recommended

•  – with bullet points for all the key tactics

Transnational Protest and Global Activism ed Della Porta and S Tarrow (2005)

Organising for Social Change – manual for activists S Max et al (3rd ed 2001)

The 8 stages of successful movements Bill Moyer (1987) an article by a social activist which 

in some 40 pages gives the essence

• From Mobilisation to Revolution  Charles Tilly (1978) one of 2 great US writers on revolution, 
  the other being Sidney Tarrow  

Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky (1972) The basic guidebook for change agents everywhere 

by the radical Chicago community organiser

Why Men Rebel Ted Gurr (1970) a rather academic study of the phenomenon

UPDATE
Why Reform isn’t enough (The Peaceful Revolutionary 2025)

immigration 
Peter McCormack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C4h0pYzY7M 
David Starkey on UK doom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5emeJ_XyM4 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McZOj3j7gPI UK commander 
David Betz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgwO9G1hmDQ