Sarah Hoyt has a thoughtful piece over at PJ Media explaining why she expects the current playacting at revolution by the Left to fail. She argues the false premises of the marxist philosophical worldview of the Left has so distorted their perceptions of Reality that they can’t understand why their efforts to bring about Utopia keep failing. In frustration the Left is throwing a tantrum because things aren’t “fair.”
They expect that the “99 Percent” will rise up in solidarity with them to overthrow the “1 Percent” of capitalist oppressors. However, it’s the Left that won the slow revolutionary march through the institutions over the past fifty years. It’s Leftists who now make up most of the “1 Percent.”
Real revolutions, not the left’s pretend theater, are not “and the people rose up.” That’s usually the last stage. Real revolutions are caused by living conditions/ways of making a living changing so dramatically that ideology must follow.
Communism and socialism were – though heads-on-pants insane – well suited to the mentality of mass production and mass movements.
They’re fish out of water in the 21st century. Which is why every move they make turns against them. Their heads are full of a society that no longer exists.
I’m not saying they’re not a danger, particularly in the areas – geographic and social – they control. What I’m saying is that they’re losing that control.
Read the whole thing.
In effect, proles who thought they had been guaranteed a spot in the Outer Party and had a shot at making it into the Inner Party are raging because their Fill-in-the-Blank Studies degrees did not qualify them for anything other than struggling to service a significant debt on a barista’s wages. One part of the left is revolting against another.
This has happened before. During the middle years of the last century, the international socialist fought the national socialists in Europe. Sarah Hoyt argues that we’re now seeing the death rattle of the Left’s revolution rather than its birth pains. I hope she’s right.
I often like Sarah’s ideas, and this article by her has some good ideas in it. But it’s naive.
Having good intentions and good ideas isn’t what puts you in power. Brute force is. The left just spent the past 170 years training every generation of leftists on all the different angles to use force in order to seize control. You don’t have to have right theories to win at that game. Did the Bolsheviks have good theories? Did Mao? They won anyway. And today we have the left manufacturing hundreds of (admittedly often absurd) theories and incidents that are supposed to justify brute force. If nothing else, they understand that force and lust for power are good for their side.
That’s great, “grammar commenter!” But what do ya do about it? Well, I think the fact that the bad guys have bad arguments is somewhat in our favor, and by all means, go out there and beat them at arguments when that comes up. But this is really about power. And they need to be totally deprived of all that. So instead of only asking, “Why is this leftist wrong?” start asking, “Where does his power come from, and what additional powers does he seek?” When you answer that second question, take away and deny that power from him.
Mao did get one thing right. Political power does grow from the barrel of a gun. While the Left has greatly increased the size of the civilian bureaucracies’ armories (the Department of Education has a SWAT team), it has not been successful in disarming the public.
Will the public allow society to become disordered? Or will we see something like the Battle of Athens writ large in which the people restore order?