Wojtek Sokolowski:
> Russia & Austro-Hungary were pretty rotten inside - but it was WW I that
> did them in - the 1905 revolution ended up in a bloodbath (after all, even
> a rotten empire can amass greater military organization and firepower than
> a bunch of guys with sticks and guns). India was did in by the Brits, and
> so was the Ottoman Empire. Ditto for China - it was dismantled first by
> Europeans and latter by Japanese occupation, without which Mao would have
> never succeeded. Pre WWII Eastern European statelets were dismantled by
> Hitler's invasion that, thogether with the Red Army, cleared the way for
> getting rid of the landed gentry and bourgeoisie.
>
> Not a single case of a successful revolution from below that was not preced
> by a frontal attack on the state by other states.
Not counting satellites, that's a universal condition of states, is it not? At any given point, they've been through a war. Or, as some say, the state _is_ war. Had the Tsar been a clever fellow, he would have stayed out of the war; even Rasputin said so. But his governent was too crappy and corrupt to make the right decision. Onward, however....
> >However, that's government -- a noxious, parasitical, endemic
> >social disease. What about the replacement of whole cultural
> >systems, as with the success of Christianity and of capitalism?
> >These did not take place as coups d'état; the coups, revolutions
> >and wars occurred after they had pretty much succeeded on lower
> >social levels.
> Never happened. European capitalism was an evolutionary change that grew
> out of the feudal institutions and the challenges (populations surplus)
> they faced. It looks like a revolution only when we collapse a few hunder
> years into a dramatic histroical narrative. In England, the feudal gentry
> became bourgeoisie. In continental Europe, feudal gentry did not have as
> much power to begin with and the growth of the merchant class & bourgeoisie
> grew together with the state apparatus. The industrial "revolution" is a
> myth - its institutional foundations were build long before its outcomes
> came to the full view.
A revolution is a pronounced or complete change in something. A cultural revolution, such as Christianity or capitalism, then, is a revolution if it changes a lot of culture -- a lot of social relations and customs -- regardless of how long it takes to do it. My point was that neither of these revolutions were imagined or carried out by people at the top, by governments or revolutionaries of the military sort. They grew up in the interstices of existing arrangements and eventually supplanted them. _Then_ the bully-boys showed up to do them service.