If you’re in the majority, you have the votes to be able to accomplish something with reform. It’s not like we live in a monarchy, reform is possible under our system.
If reform isn’t working to bring about your goals, either your goals aren’t popular enough, or they are popular but the people lack the will and organization to vote for them.
If the people lack the will and organization to vote effectively, they certainly lack the will and organization to topple the government.
My area of expertise is managing complex systems and change implementation. I sincerely don’t understand how revolution is supposed to work where reform doesn’t. No one has been able to give me an answer that doesn’t bill down to idealistic hope. How is this revolution supposed to be implemented, and why can’t we build the foundation for revolution while simultaneously using the tools we have for reform? Wouldn’t widespread support for reform be the best possible proof of consensus?
There’s only so many organizing hours in the day. When we spend them on reform, the opportunity cost is that we are not spending them building revolution.
There are precious few ways to have a revolution. But there are many ways to have reform.
That’s the first problem - reform spreads the finite resources of organizing time over a much wider target area, which dissipates the energy.
The second problem is that reform doesn’t actually work. All the energy being funneled into reform doesn’t actually determine the reform - the power structure determines it. Revolution seeks to change the power structure. This would strip power from the people who currently have it. If you use reform to do that, it necessarily passes through the power structure and gets deformed.
Take for example universal healthcare in America. It is hugely popular. A super majority of the country supports it. There was enough organizing energy to elect a black president, but somehow, we got the ACA instead. Why? Because the people who have the power right now benefit from the current state of US healthcare and enacting universal healthcare would strip them of their power vis-a-vis healthcare. They hold the mechanisms of reform in their hands, so all the organizing time that went into universal healthcare reform got deformed into the ACA which further entrenched the existing power holders.
It’s been almost 20 years and we’re still trying to get that popular reform to happen.
Reform has never worked, because it explicitly relies on the power structure it is trying to change. The revolutionary analysis is that popular needs are not met and that reform will not meet them and historically this has always been true. Revolutionary analysis shows that it’s not about popularity but about power and history has shown this to be true. Focusing our efforts on the root cause is how the change occurs. Spreading out our focus to all of the various symptoms is how change is thwarted.