Not true. You may need an educated vanguard party, but not an educated population. Even then, the vanguard need only be "educated" in legitimate theory. An "educated population" that has been educated mostly in capitalist propaganda like in the US is a hindrance to revolution, definitely not a requirement. "Uneducated" people aren't dumb, they can still recognize inequality and the injustice of not being able to eat while a small elite wallows in the wealth made off their labor.
CindyTheSkull
joined 3 years ago
Or Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf.
When Naomi Klein Realized People Regularly Confused Her With Naomi Wolf, She Went Down a Rabbit Hole
This is the right answer. Several of the the comments in this thread have correctly identified climate change as an important factor, but it seems like they aren't recognizing how much of an accelerant for revolution it really is. Maybe revolution is not the perfect term here so much as radical and extreme political change because as you say, it can go in the direction of communism or fascism depending as always on the material conditions. Either way, the current status quo for every nation on the planet doesn't have long left, and its death is going to happen faster and faster in the coming few decades.
Exactly. And in turn, revolutions in the periphery weakens the core and increases the possibility of eventual revolution there as well. All of these systems have built-in feedback loops that need to be considered and exploited.
I think what you're failing to take into consideration is that all those poor countries that haven't had communist revolutions have had the weight of the most powerful empire ever to exist on earth bearing down on them and doing its best to ensure any communist revolution was strangled in its crib. Yet despite this, some of them succeeded in communist revolutions anyway! The lack of revolutions in the periphery since the advent of capitalism is not evidence for the lack of revolutionary potential in a starving population. Saying it is is just not taking all the material conditions into account.
Well I've been trying to educate them with as much good faith response as I can muster. I considered just posting PPB, but I guess because I'm medicated, I felt compelled to press on. Anyway, I heavily quoted from this excellent site: DecolonizePalestine & their myth database. I would recommend it to anyone else, especially if you plan to argue with zionists or their dipshit water-carriers like the one in the image.
Truly, we should all be grateful that such a geopolitical genius has risen to solve the world's problems. We need to put that giga-humanist mind to work on getting Russia to play nice with poor smol bean Ukraine next.
Well, you have to follow Rinox's entire plan. Creating a "well-defined border" will ensure that any animosity between the two ethnostates won't ever become a problem. Also they all have to stop having religions altogether. Easy peasy.
Actually, I will die by your side on that hill, or at least put in a good effort before retreating. The main reason I was repeating how the writing was poor is because the book gets held up as like this literary masterpiece since it's taught in schools and is on every single list of "books you must read before you die." Of course the reason it's taught in school is largely about propaganda, not literary genius, but the people who love it will talk about it like it's barely a step down from Shakespeare, even though a lot of the writing is objectively cringe. Like I just read the hero's opening description as having "ruggedly handsome features." But I agree, it's really good at what it does well. I think in most cases and in most spaces, it should be shit on and taken down a peg because it doesn't deserve its common position as being this great masterpiece, but the other side of that coin is that it's an entertaining and effective book, certainly not trash simply by virtue of how it gets used to serve a reactionary agenda.
Forgive me for posting the same comment twice, but since I just was talking about 1984 in this thread, I'll say here as well that I don't think you should be ashamed for enjoying multiple reads of it. I harp on how bad the writing was, but honestly it was... passable. But more importantly, I would argue that that book really did capture some important concepts and feelings and fears that were floating around. It's just that it was written by a hardcore liberal at heart who just had to fucking blame communism instead of taking the accurate path and blaming capitalism and imperialism. Anyway... what I just posted in another comment:
It's not even that 1984 was a terrible book. It is rather poorly written by an author who was kinda a shit writer, but the dude did capture a certain important and lasting zeitgeist. He did identify an undercurrent of fear, a very valid fear, that permeated culture. The problem was that he misidentified the direction where the fear was coming from, the systems it was actually bubbling up from were the capitalist systems. But commies were both easy and profitable to make the enemies. The source was the society he actually knew better and mostly lived in, but he had witnessed other systems and wanted to project all the negativity onto the socialist systems that, again, benefited him to badmouth. His book could have been still a poorly written but interestingly prescient warning of capitalism, what it was what it was becoming (and what it is), and some of the extremes trends towards... That's what could have been if he had correctly attributed the dystopian elements as being rooted in capitalism instead of communism. Also, even thought he may not have been a great writer in general, he was good with using phrases that fit well in the milieu at the time and continue to. Like "thought police" and "Doublethink" and "Newspeak" and "memory hole." "Big Brother is watching." "We've always been at war with East Oceania." Bunch of others. There is a reason that shit stuck around, reason that goes beyond just the fact that the capitalists blew it up and made it popular, this otherwise mediocre book they held up for its usefulness in propaganda as some great bulwark against the terrors of communism. Really a tragedy that Orwell was a fucking rat-narc liberal coward.
No one is making anything "sound easy," we're just pointing out the fact that education is not and never has been a prerequisite for revolution. It's ignorant, ahistortical, and bordering on chauvinism to say that's the reason "all the poor countries" haven't had revolutions. It's ridiculous on it's face when you actually look at history and see that almost all successful revolutions that became AES countries did so with the support and participation of their largely uneducated populous. Or no, I guess the masses of peasantry in rural China all went to uni otherwise the Chinese revolution could never have happened. ๐