Why do we have to have a step by step revolution? Are there other ways that would work? When we look at our present systems, we see that they need to be changed in many ways. Look at just a few of the ways our present systems are making things worse for people instead of better. Unemployment is high and not coming down quickly; in many countries it is increasing; and in a second economic downturn it will be getting worse. Economic crashes are occurring more often and they are getting bigger. We expect inflation, but maybe there will be deflation first. The near future, the next few years, seems unpredictable. Will there be another crash and another great depression? Those who are employed don’t know how long their jobs will last. Young people wonder why they should go to college when there may be no jobs for them when and if they graduate. College expenses have been increasing faster than inflation and students must take out loans that they will not be able to pay back for many years. The housing market has been messed up in multiple ways and no one has much confidence that owning a house is a good deal any more. Environmental degradation and destruction continue unchecked. New wars continue one after another. The banks which caused or hastened the crash continue essentially unregulated. In any case they always find new workarounds for any regulations. They violate our laws, local, state, and federal and are not punished, whereas ordinary people, the 99%, are arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned for minor victimless offenses. The politicians and government officials are bought and paid for. Our democracy has been hijacked. Many people mindlessly absorb ridiculous propaganda from the TV and have no clue how they are being used by the rich. And the government/corporation complex operates in secret and is taking away our rights, our freedoms, slowly, one at a time, so we don’t notice.
I could go on, but too much of this listing of what is wrong with our present political and economic system can lead to defeatism, inaction, gloom, and mental depression.
With so much that needs fixing, we could crudely conclude that we must overthrow the whole thing — get rid of it all at once, once and for all, and replace it by some better system we build from scratch. That may sound good but it won’t work for several reasons.
If we should get rid of the present system, what is the new system that we would replace it with? We just described in a few previous posts that the grand economic theories don’t work. And nobody can design a whole new economic and political system from scratch. We could not possibly know how such a newly designed system would work unless we could see it actually working. All such systems can only come into existence through evolution — they are built up from what came before, they are built by changing, by adding to, or deleting something from, what already exists, one step at a time. Real human systems are too complicated. That’s why no grand theory can describe or explain them. That’s also why we can’t just overthrow our present political and economic system all at once. It’s too complicated. Everything is interconnected with everything else. We are all interconnected with everyone else. That quasi-mystical idea that “all is one” has a real world practical meaning. If we were to destroy our present systems all at once, we would all starve.
So we don’t really have a choice. We must proceed step by step modifying our present systems. This will still allow the possibility that the system that results after many, many careful steps may be quite far removed from any economic system we now know. In other words we can still make big, significant changes and as a result arrive at a much different system than we have now. We can have a big revolution accomplished through multiple small directed evolutionary steps — steps that through trial and error bring us closer to our revolutionary goal of a just distribution of the human necessities.
There are many problems with our present systems for which, right now, we have no, or very few, ideas as to how to fix them. You will notice that I sometimes consider just our “economic systems” and in other places I write “economic and political systems”. This is because the economic and political systems are different although in practice they are inseparable. The evolutionary revolutionary process described above suggests that we use the democratic process to change our laws at each step. But how can we change the laws to produce systems that move us closer to our goals if our democratic processes have been captured by the elites, the rich, the 1%, the zealots for the present failed systems? There are some ideas out there, but I haven’t explored them enough yet to say anything now.
Also it will be helpful to examine some possible first steps. And it will be helpful to discuss the benefits for all of us if we should develop systems that bring us close to our just distribution goals.
HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTION? 