The Gen Z uprising in Bagladesh toppled a hated government (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
Angela Davis, the US civil rights activist, once said, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time”.
Davis didn’t mean you must wake up every morning calling for a revolution. Instead, the task is finding ways of connecting those around you to a different future.
That process can include everything from relatively small actions—wearing an anti-racist badge to work, for example—to leading revolts and arguing for workers’ power.
Everything we are taught, and much of what we experience, encourages us to think that there is no alternative to capitalism and that attempts to change things are doomed to fail.
Capitalist ideas colonise people’s minds. We get locked into competing with others, blaming individuals for systemic failures.
The police force protects property and represses peaceful protests. But the most dangerous police officer is not the one wielding a baton—it is the one in our heads.
The radical poet William Blake called these the “mind‑forged manacles,” and they chain us to the system.
But revolutions are much more common than our rulers want us to think.
The 20th century saw a revolution in every decade—and this century has continued the trend, with the Arab Spring from 2010 to 2012, the Sudanese Revolution of 2018 and the “Gen Z” uprisings across the globe more recently.
Revolution is possible because capitalism is the most rapidly changing economic and social system in history.
It is built on competition between different owners of the means of production—from the small factories of the
19th century to the multinational corporations of today.
This competition forces every company to seek to transform production methods, which means closing old industries and opening new ones.
Towns and cities that grew up around certain products are decimated. People find the future they looked forward to has been destroyed by decisions taken in distant boardrooms.
Capitalism forces them to change the very rhythm of their lives, learn new skills, move to new areas and fear constantly the next upheaval.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed, “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
“All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”
This tendency towards constant, unpredictable change has intensified over the last two centuries. Shifts in global production and new technologies mean that billions of people live in fear of losing their livelihoods.
Under this system, the exploitation of labour is connected to military might. Those seeking increased wealth seize it by force, knowing the accumulation of arms permits the accumulation of capital.
Peace is just an interlude until the next war. Imperialist war not only brings terrible suffering. It can shake society to its core, break old routines and reveal the violence at its heart.
As Marxist author Chris Harman wrote, wars “can lead to the most reactionary ideas and monstrous behaviour taking hold but can also result in a questioning of the system that leads to war and to confrontation with the politicians, generals and tycoons who rejoice in it”.
The climate catastrophe has an equally profound social impact. Like economic turmoil and imperialist war, it is uprooting people and destroying traditional ways of life.
All this creates an ideological crisis for those who rule. Their authority rests on persuading us that this is the best possible system, that wars and environmental destruction are aberrations—products of human nature that can be smoothed out by “reforms”.
These systemic failures create ideological vacuums that can be filled by irrational conspiracy theories and far right propaganda.
But such crises can also make millions of people turn against capitalism itself. Into this explosive mix come moments when oppressed groups resist and win solidarity from wider layers of society.
That process is aided by one of the features of capitalism. As it tears families and communities apart, always seeking to divide us, it also concentrates those it exploits in giant cities and workplaces.
And it is here that we have power. Capitalism creates a class with the capacity to organise against it and the potential to turn society on its head.
New forms of employment create fresh workforces. At first, these workers are generally dismissed as incapable of self-organisation.
But throughout history, we have seen such people assert themselves as powerful sections of the working class movement.
Huge numbers of workers are today organising in hospitals, distribution networks and in offices—areas once thought immune to unionisation.
Technology has always dominated the workers who operate it. But technology also gives new groups of workers enormous power. And they are beginning to use it.
South Korean Samsung workers recently voted for a strike which threatened global supply chains of semiconductors.
These are essential for everything from data centres to smartphones and electric vehicles. They won the bonuses their unions had demanded.
This apparent contradiction between rapid advance and increasing misery was present in Marx’s time.
He wrote, “On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the Roman Empire.
“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new‑fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want.”
The discovery of the power to fight back collectively occurs among the evolving working class of the 21st century, just as it did in the 20th and 19th centuries.
Apathy can transform into its opposite when people get a taste of their power. And revolutions happen when vast numbers of people feel they can only get what they need by taking matters into their own hands.
The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin pointed to two elements necessary for this transformation in behaviour to occur.
First, the lower classes must reach a point where they feel the conditions of life are increasingly intolerable. But anger at poverty, corruption and repression are not enough to generate a revolution.
The second element is that the ruling class loses its authority, becomes bitterly divided, argues and panics.
A revolutionary situation opens up when splits inside a ruling class meet rising discontent among the mass of people. When that happens, ideas and expectations change dramatically.
Eduard Dune was a teenager in Moscow during the 1917 Russian Revolution.
He marvelled at how “the mood of the crowd was transmitted from one to another like conduction, like a spontaneous burst of laughter, joy or anger.
“There were those who had been praying for the good health of the imperial family. Now they were shouting ‘Down with the tsar’ and not disguising their joyful contempt,” he wrote.
To secure a future differnt from capitalism, every revolution must drive forward and resist people’s hesitation and timidity, which can open the door to the ruling class returning to power.
And every revolution must address the question of state power.
We have seen the rise of increasingly authoritarian methods deployed by “democratic” states. And we’ve seen how people are prepared to defy them—from Palestine Action protests here in Britain to defending migrants against Ice agents in the US.
When our side, the global majority, has power, we can begin to refashion all the things our labour under capitalism has created—the technologies, medical breakthroughs and distribution chains—to answer human and planetary need.
Capitalism creates the potential for socialism, the material wealth, the technology, the global working class. And revolutions will continue to rock the ruling class.
But to replace their system with ours, we need to be organised, educated and ready to fight back.
Thousands of residents in London have been without water for months
The climate crisis is impossible to ignore
The human cost of the heatwaves are higher than the temperature
Divide and rule was used to undermine struggle
