So You Say You Want a Revolution

Revolution is always about material conditions and is never ever, ever, ever, ever about an ideology whipping people up into a revolutionary frenzy. All societies have contradictions inherent to however they have set themselves up and will produce a set of critiques based on on those contradictions; the material produces the ideological. No society ever just says 'fuck it, those contradictions are pretty fucking contradictory better blow it all up' unless things are going absolutely shit for most people and the state itself has neither the power, inclination, or resources to do anything about it.

So, climate change. Revolution is going to be a total fantasy until the suburban lifestyle is no longer even remotely feasible. It is going to take the average suburbanite being transformed into a revolutionary subject not through ideology but through the material conditions of their everyday life. This is not to suggest that revolutionary action cannot occur principally on the back of ideological work, consider the Iranian revolutions. But the lesson in that case, is that those revolutions which are more borne of ideology than material conditions tend to be false revolutions which take a reactionary backslide as soon as the existing power structure has been toppled. You replace a corrupt and repressive "democratic" monarchy with a corrupt and repressive "democratic" theocracy.

"No one knows when the day or hour will come" but one can always be on the lookout for signs. Take a walk two blocks in any direction off the beaten path of the nicest neighborhood in your area, how many foreclosure signs and abandoned properties do you see? What's the line like at the local food pantry? How often are you hearing sirens at night? What was the per capital of Dollar General type stores in your town five years ago compared to today? You're never going to get a true read by watching the news but you will by just looking around.

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