Revolution is not when you exchange one group of landlords for a different set. It is a total upending of systems. That is the true meaning. Soc dems and reformists think we can just change the window dressing and call it systemic. “If the new lord is better than the old lord we can return to the happiness of feudalism.” What a terrible thing to believe.
We must reclaim this term. These terms belong to the people not a bunch of centuries dead slaveholding jackasses in powdered wigs who didn’t change a goddamn thing.
Just something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Bourgeois revolutions are still revolutions. They put the old regime and the old aristocratic order to rest, which allowed capitalism to evolve into what it is today. We also don’t really need to reclaim the term at all, it’s already ours, since the bourgeoisie have (for the most part) disowned their own revolutionary past. They now speak of figures like Robespierre as if they were crazy, bloodthirsty murderers, even though they have the power that they have now because of figures like him.
Conservatism is largely defined by its opposition to the French Revolution (in the way it happened more than ideological difference). It is all based on avoiding societal upheaval. Burke was very much a liberal, but he was decrying the French Revolution in real time.
Conservatism is such a strange ideology in that it is almost entirely bereft of any values other than avoiding change that is deemed too rapid. A socialist who shies away from socialists who had revolutions as being too bloody and who is aiming to take electoral power is also a conservative, as much as they may ideologically be wanting the same goals as the socialist revolutionaries.