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Personally, I feel revolution may soon be the only hope we have left to change the world. But reform would be preferable to violence, though I do know reform likely would never work.
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Fellow leftists:reform or revolution
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3 Replies
Reply by EngiQu33ring
posted
I see this question in leftist spaces a lot and it always bothers me because it carries the implicit assumption that top-down change is the solution to making things better when, in my experience, top-down solutions are deeply inefficient.
I don't think I'd call myself a reformist because our institutions are frequently structured to use reformers as a tool to achieve their ends. That said, if more leftists focused their attention to pushing progressives into the seats of their local city councils it would get a ton of people off the streets and fill the shelves at a lot of food banks.
The big institutions need to be rebuilt from the ground up, but if the goal is to make everyone's life better that has to start with change at the local level.
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Reply by Milan Vosáhlo
posted
Revolution does not necessarily mean violence. In my country, we had a so-called velvet revolution, where we peacefully transitioned from communism to democracy after 30 years of soviet occupation.
The country has been right-wing ever since, and now pretty much everyone who works is doing well, and there is more jobs than people thanks to the free market, so if I were you, I wouldn't hurry turning the country even more on the left side.
Reply by dreamspider
posted
How is revolution less violent than reform? How many thousands of people die a year from preventable scenarios because of government incompetence or maliciousness? Turn on the news, how many innocent people are shot by the police each year? How many people die of disease because they can only access food that slowly kills them, and are unable to pay for the treatments that could help them? How many people have died in wars for oil that the government has started to keep the military industrial complex happy? Revolution is violent, but the government right now exercises a slow, insidious violence that kills it's citizens- especially those marginalized. Racism, patriarchy, ableism etc. are weaved into the very fabric of the U.S. government. Reform will solve nothing. We must see a complete revolution if we have any hope of restoring community and granting equal rights to everyone.