There is a recurring tendency within revolutionary politics to greet every crisis with optimism. Inflation rises, wages stagnate or fall, housing becomes unaffordable, ecological collapse accelerates, governments become increasingly reactionary, and someone inevitably declares that these are "good." Not because they are good in themselves, but because they are believed to contain the seeds of revolutionary transformation. The suffering of the present is interpreted as the midwife of a liberated future.
This tendency is neither confined to the political left nor unique to the twenty-first century. Throughout the history of capitalism, socialists, anarchists, communists, as well as fascists, liberals, and conservatives have all, at different moments, imagined catastrophe as politically clarifying. The wager is simple. The contradictions of society intensify until they become unbearable, forcing people to abandon old illusions, confront reality, and take action, lawful or otherwise.
Whether this wager is correct remains one of the most difficult questions facing revolutionary politics. The phrase "things have to get worse before they get better" expresses an intuition rooted in historical materialism. If the existing order continues to satisfy enough people's immediate needs, then those people have relatively little incentive to overthrow it. Reform appears preferable to revolution. Stability reproduces consent. Capitalism is not static. It generates recurring crises. Falling profitability, unemployment, debt, environmental destruction, imperial conflict, housing shortages, and declining public services are not external accidents but recurring features of the system itself. From this perspective, worsening conditions expose capitalism's inability to meet human needs. This is not obviously irrational. Revolutions rarely emerge during periods of widespread prosperity. They tend to occur during crises.
Yet this observation immediately confronts a second one. Most crises do not produce revolution, they produce exhaustion. Misery is not consciousness. The assumption that suffering naturally radicalizes people confuses necessity with possibility. Material hardship creates grievances. It does not automatically create revolutionary consciousness. A worker facing eviction may join a tenants' union. The same worker may instead blame immigrants, or become politically apathetic, or devote every waking hour simply to surviving. The crisis itsel
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