do you plan a revolution

Question

Is their any groups that are planing on rebelling against capitalism?



edited to remove useless tags and to add a funny(?) one

Comments

these tags suck.

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the question however is GREAT

Answer 1

No, and then yes.

Although these tags suck, anonymous, your question illustrates how revolution and rebellion are often misconstrued as the same thing. At least to my thinking they are not.

Any groups actively planning a revolution probably ought not be known to a group as unaccountable and alienated (as in: from each other, mediated via an interweb discussion board) as the folks on this site if they don't want to end up being sold some fake plastique by the FBI. Certainly no one who posts here /ought/ to tell you about their personal plans for a revolution.

When people talk about revolution, generally they are talking about a big event where we raise the flags, storm the palace, string up the last tyrant by the guts of the last capitalist, burn the church, burn the state, burn the money that makes us hate,  and so on and so forth. This revolution will, presumably, be followed with a new world (it was growing in the shell of the old!) of anarchism.

Rebelling against capitalism is a different bag. Lots of people rebel against capitalism all the time, in lots of ways. Some are spectacular (like smashing windows or bombing banks) and some are more everyday forms of rebelling, like (at risk of sounding like I'm CrimethIncin') stealing from work or shoplifting, informal systems of exchange, squatting and refusing to pay.

Most of us, most of the time, fall on the latter side of the rebellion spectrum. Some folks some of the time do the former, and an even smaller number go all out on the spectacular (and hat's off to them!). With rebellion against capitalism (or the state, or society, or all of them), the implication, at least to my thinking is that is something that is at once more visceral and more like a series of ongoing skirmishes with and subversions of what we hate. There is overlap, to be sure (and we haven’t even talked about how I would distinguish revolution and rebellion from revolt), but for the most part I tend to think of revolution as an idea that has more traction with leftists (whether anarchist or, especially, those who prefer one of the 31 flavors of Marxism), whereas most of the anarchists I associate with look for those moments where we have opportunities to widen or expand the moments of rebellion.

Comments

words I refrained from using: insurrection, conflictuality, rupture.