this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Many of those have been accomplished by protests, that led to changes in law, that led to changes in society. Some by war, yes.
None by revolution, that I'm aware of. None by anarchy, that I'm aware of. In most cases revolution seems to throw things the other way, back into slavery, back into repression.
This is ahistorical, really. Revolution has historically happened in progressive movements beyond brutal previous conditions, whether it be the Haitian Slave Revolt, the French overthrow of the Monarchy, the Russian overthrow of the brutal Tsarist regime, the Cuban revolt against slavery and fascism, and more.
I think you would do well for yourself by studying history of revolutionary movements.
So you're telling me none of those lead to more brutal oppression than before?
If you just want to limit it to Haiti, Cuba, and the USSR, then yes each of those revolutions led to a vastly more humane society than the previous one. It also depends on who you're asking. Tsar Nicholas II certainly didn't see the Soviet Union as an improvement. Cuban plantation owners with dozens of slaves didn't see socialism as an improvement. There are winners and losers in history, the losing side usually isn't going to be pleased.
And who loses in a revolution? In a successful socialist revolution it's the capitalist class, colonizers, slavers, the previous bureaucracy, regional landlords. The USSR went from a backwater literal peasant kingdom to a space faring modern country within a single generation, despite a famine and despite the brutal loss of life in WW2. It's very easy to say the country that sends women to school to become nuclear engineers is not as brutally oppressive as the country with a monarch that forcefully sends women to become nuns. How do you determine oppression? Go look at things like literacy, child mortality, education, home ownership, access to clean water, and what kind of occupations women have. By those metrics, socialist revolutions typically and vastly reduce oppression.