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.
Gerald Horne’s Counter-Revolution of 1776, once I really wrapped my head around the implications of what he was covering, kinda blew my mind. The idea that we’ve largely erased an ongoing and advancing uprising of enslaved folks by wallpapering over it with a counter-revolution of rich people convincing poor people to fight for freedom and liberty was a big
moment for me. Following that up with Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States really cemented it in, when I learned about the agrarian uprisings and how the constitutional convention was basically a coup to secure the investments of those rich people and institutionalize their position.