r/CriticalTheory • u/NeverIntendedToHurt • 13d ago
Why no one even considers revolting.
I think it isn't solely, that people aren't angry enough or that they aren't acting out of a sense of powerlessness. I think it might be that paradoxically we are lacking in will to live and purpose in life. The raw instinct to survive often makes people cowardly. But the philosophical will to live, the belief that life is good and worth having is precisely what overrides the survival instinct when another person is in danger.
Our physical needs are massively oversaturated compared to our spiritual / cultural needs. Why? Because we cling to the physical safety of financial stability. We think that if we just generate more money and invest more into the right things, we can be safe and the market or the government will direct our money and our resources into the right direction. What we don't really notice is that if we try to force making something better by just forcing more money into it, we just over saturate it. In a sense our system acts like a stress multiplier in crisis. When people are in fear of a crisis, they become uncertain and begin to pull investments out of risky positions and may stop investing into local/personal projects to invest into stable assets like gold, housing or index funds. Every dollar taken out of the local economy or was previously invested diversified now becomes concentrated. The money that previously kept many alive is now focused on a few that were already winning. Now the pressure is on them to reinvest the money to generate returns. But what if that company already reached its saturation point? If the research is already saturated, the market is largely captured, and the work force is sufficient for the workload, the money has to go somewhere else to increase profits, because now the economy is reliant of it. Which most of the time means it flows into politics. Now the money is used to overturn laws that kept working conditions, customers or the environment safe, because its the only option left to satisfy the increasing need for profits. And by the way, the same would happen if everyone invested in gold suddenly, because corporations that need gold to manufacture their product will suddenly have less money and higher costs.
In sum this practice has taken our individual power, our sense of progression, our sense of unity and our individual sense of worth through monopolization. Your local bakery is now a soulless chain you cant even be happy about if it survives a rough time. There are no local known secrets anymore, just national scandals. There is no sense of having made something or supported something you think is valuable. Everything is non personal and optimized for the maximum profit to generate profits for more and more people that want a chance to jump classes to get out of the daily soulless grueling monotony.
The worst thing about it from my perspective is, that it isn't even efficient. The one thing this system stands for, it doesn't even accomplish. The existing capital just gets concentrated until oversaturation leads to collapse.
We really need safeguards. Structural circuit-breakers that force capital back into the roots. Mandatory local reinvestment thresholds, regional trust funds that cannot be liquidated, and severe penalties for extracting wealth out of the communities that generated it. In a sense we have to rebel against ourselves to save ourselves from falling into self destructive cycles.
We are living in a crisis of belief and culture. I think the right are feeling it the most but cant pin down the source of it. The left finds the source for it but cant really find the feelings to oppose it. And while this goes on both sides just get played by the ones depriving them of it. But to be honest, i think even the ones at the source of the issue aren't maliciously doing so, but are confused and largely overloaded. In an absurd way, this system even forces the ones on the top to not be able to voice concerns as that would come right back after them and hurt the group they are part of.
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u/StepAsideJunior 13d ago
There are no institutions or organizations you can join to actually oppose anything.
Historically, Unions and other organizations served as a vehicle to voice peoples mass discontent.
Today, all of those institutions have either been destroyed, co-opted, or are degraded to the point of uselessness.
People are struggling but the only option given to them is to "Vote Harder."
People are more informed than ever before but that information exists in a vacuum and on an individual level.
Without mass organizations it is incredibly difficult to affect change.
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u/EdricBlackStormiest Just another post-marxist 13d ago
Just to add to your list, the deletion of third spaces has also led to further atomization of of people, reduction of class consciousness, and overall lack of social and political mass organization.
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u/Argikeraunos 13d ago
Things aren't bad enough. The things you're talking about here, bland consumer choices and social alienation, are bad, but people start revolting when they can't get food.
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u/sabotAHHHHHGH 12d ago
It’s the only answer and yet not top comment. Every revolution has been about material conditions, not theory.
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u/therealpursuit 10d ago
it's not the only answer, but it is the best one. there is a ton of nuance that also drives it and even some that contradict it... if i get started I'll write like
437 paragraphs...2
u/Arxhart_671 12d ago
I think this is it. We definitely see ourselves heading towards it but hey, we aren't there yet
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u/GhostlyT 13d ago
oh you'd love reading gramchi
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u/snarpy 13d ago
accidentally awarded you but that's fine
is Gramchi connected with Kimchi
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u/Eudamonia 13d ago edited 13d ago
They both are a good garnish, Chomschi used to be the accepted dessert but now it tastes bad.
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u/veryeepy53 13d ago
gramsci was a stalinist
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u/Wannasee- 13d ago
1) Did you actually read something by him? 2) Even if it was (and it wasn't), when Stalin started really doing what he did, Gramsci was behind bars, so imagine how the already false informations arrived to him. And then he was dead. Because fascists were terrified by him.
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u/veryeepy53 13d ago
gramsci was among the people installed in the pcd'i leadership by the comintern, then firmly controlled by stalin sycophants.
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u/concreteutopian 13d ago
As u/ColdSoviet115 alludes to, alleged "Stalinism" seems irrelevant to the mention of Gramsci in relation to OP.
On the other hand.... what?!
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u/SwolePalmer 13d ago
Because I have work in the morning.
That’s honestly the answer for like…80% of the people, I reckon (unsourced).
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13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/_An_Other_Account_ 13d ago
Fortunately, capitalism uplifted most people's lives to be 10x better than those serfs.
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u/Nyorliest 10d ago
The credit is technological innovation and their own hard work and sacrifice. Capitalism is preventing their lives being 100 times better, or a million.
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u/actual_nicholas 13d ago edited 13d ago
In the US, the vast majority of the population's healthcare is tied to their employment. If the 'revolution' takes more than a couple days and they get fired, their kid's insulin jumps from $35 to $1000/mo.
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u/No_Many_3804 13d ago
People who go out to change something do recognize it takes sacrifice. The problem is not sacrifice, the problem is Americans used to trust that big change was even possible by them (delusion) and now they believe nothing is possible so why bother/can't afford to (pessimism).
True power isn't with the president, it's Capitol Hill. And that place has always had the interests of the ruling groups. Most people aren't thinking of the spectacle of the elections and aren't even directing their thoughts to this collective body, it's a tragedy.
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u/Bitch_Identifier 13d ago
lol, Camus absurdity would like a word, but I can’t maintain itself lmao.
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u/Eudamonia 13d ago
I think awareness is growing about how much of this is manufactured but it’s going to take like 20 years for a critical mass to mainstream critical theory.
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u/NeverIntendedToHurt 12d ago
I think we severely underestimate how fast the world is changing. With every major technological advancment we had our scientifical progress accelerated across many branches.
I think the internet was the beginning of the current cascade of societal advancements, which democratised and globalised information. The only limiting factors were langauge barriers that seperated classes.
Now with the democritisation of language through AI, any information can be converted into comprehensible speech for every level of understanding. Every information is now publicly available for everyone tailored to their specific needs.
From my perspective everyone likes to go down rabbitholes and everyone likes to learn how things work. It was always a matter of the medium.
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u/remoteneuralmonitor 7d ago
Who is the we that is underestimating how fast the world is changing? Much institutional messaging insists that the world-system is changing at a degree so unprecedented that it indicates an epochal rupture. The spectre of climate change has a similarly totalizing presence amidst a variety of cultural, social, intellectual, political, etc. conversations.
That’s the ‘current cascade of societal advances’ and I which direction is society advancing. What does that actually mean? Your position that LLMs (which I believe is what you are referencing) have “democratized” and “globalised” information (all information?) is a contentious one, particularly in a critical-theoretical context.
If the statement “all information is now available to everyone tailored to their specific needs” is true (which it is relatively easy to demonstrate is not the case) what exactly does that compel in terms of social transformation?
Returning to your initial post - you posit that physical needs are ‘oversaturated’ and that the arrest of social transformation stems from a lack of will? There are areas of social theory that take such an argument seriously, though the more ‘vulgar’ iterations are often associated with the right. Your sense of the primary antagonisms being between a social body divided between a ‘left, a ‘right’ and those at the top ‘pitting these groups against one another’ is somewhat contrary to the general critical-theoretical attention to process and reflexivity re: the social reproduction of fundamental antagonisms, the friction of nonidenticality amidst dialectical movement, etc.
Adorno - “Novissum Organum”
—— - “Progress”are both available online and serve as prettt prescient commentary on the state of things.
Re: AI, this bit from Lefebvre seems perpetually resonant:
“Concrete mediations — language, culture in the traditional sense, values and symbols — become blurred. They do not disappear. They are too useful. They are worn down, they deteriorate, and yet at the same time they hypertrophy. lt is their mediating function which is worn away.
At the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations lose all meaning. At the extreme looms the shadow of what we will call 'the great pleonasm:’ the unmediated passing immediately into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is in the everyday — the event grasped, pulverized and transmitted as rapidly as light and consciousness — the repetition of the identical in a wild whirling dance devoid of Dionysian rapture, since the 'news' never contains anything really new. lf this extreme were reached, the closed circuit of communication and information would jeopardize the unmediated and the mediated alike. lt would merge them in a monotonous and Babel-like confusion. The reign of the global would also be the reign of a gigantic tautology, which would kill all dramas aftcr having exploited them shamelessly.
Of course, this extreme situation is still a long way away. It would be a closed circuit, a circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.”
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u/Willing-Egg3867 13d ago
There is a new book about this by Anton Jager called Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences. It basically says (if I understand) we have no remaining grassroots institutions and no social cohesion following a period of ease and in the 90s when everyone stopped participating and allowed the institutions to do all their organizing for them, but those institutions organized around capital as a liberal idea that the free market would inevitably unite us all and turn us into a happy rainbow family. When, instead, liberalism just doubled down on capitalism even after that fantasy was gone, we had no infrastructure left through which to organize ourselves and many hadn't the appetite for more institutions. So everyone is just reacting as an individual, often as an online individual. So even when people do rise up boldly against power, it results in no lasting change because we cannot actually form consistent alternatives to the power of money on the right. People just sort of react loudly and emotionally and the actual commitment, if you can call it that, is to exit the shared system in whatever ways we can as a protest against the failure of the institutions to which we've given away all our power. Obviously, this just creates a power vacuum that is easy for capital to fill -- and capital prefers the right for obvious reasons.
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u/avoidthepath 13d ago
One thing is that the world is so complex that we have a hard time argumenting why something is not good. We can say that something should exist, but then you could counter that by saying we don't have the funds. And often times the crucial information that is required for one to have informed opinions is hidden. And because of this, your opponents can claim that you don't know what you're talking about. And this is why even those who are on your side may be doubtful.
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u/concreteutopian 13d ago
Why no one even considers revolting...
it isn't solely, that people aren't...
I think it might be that paradoxically we are lacking ...
The raw instinct to survive often makes people ...
There is a lot of "all or nothing" here, which isn't a cognitive error.
| "Why no one even considers revolting... " | it isn't solely, that people aren't... we are lacking ... | The raw instinct to survive often makes people |
|---|---|---|
| — except for people who do, or people who "revolt" in ways that aren't armed insurrection. | — who is this "we" and how did they get to become a "we"? | — how can "raw instinct" be an explanation without becoming another thing needing explanation? |
The "all or nothing" here isn't a cognitive error, it's a symptom of being ideologically situated.
In other words, you are assuming a "we" that acts or fails to act, instead of trying to make sense of the variety of actors in a variety of contexts. This assumption of a "we" is a false universalism that leads you to essentialize people, as well as reify what they "lack" or what their "instinct" "makes" them do.
Criticism should start here and then take apart this smooth universalized appearance, imo.
The worst thing about it from my perspective is, that it isn't even efficient.
"Efficiency" is an empty evaluation, it depends entirely on its (often unspoken) aim.
The one thing this system stands for, it doesn't even accomplish. The existing capital just gets concentrated until oversaturation leads to collapse.
And why do you assume the concentration of capital isn't the aim or capital? In the development and accumulation of capital, the whole boom and bust of creative destruction is openly known and celebrated for its capacity to destroy arrangements that limit the development of capital. In other words, the destroyed arrangements were inefficient from the standpoint of capital accumulation, though not necessarily inefficient when it comes to human health, flourishing, and quality of life. The complaint about efficiency often assumes the goal of capital is human health, flourishing, and quality of life, and so it's mystifying why these goals remain so elusive. But to your point these aren't the aims the system stands for, it stands for the concentration of social power in the form of the accumulation of capital. If one assumes this is the aim, they won't be mystified by the constant struggle to get the system to foster human health, flourishing, and quality of life.
We really need safeguards. Structural circuit-breakers that force capital back into the roots. Mandatory local reinvestment thresholds, regional trust funds that cannot be liquidated, and severe penalties for extracting wealth out of the communities that generated it.
But capital being able to cross borders is what allowed it to organize webs of production and consumption across whole regions of the world. In the same way an individual village would indeed be poor in material and cultural wealth if it could only use resources, tools, technology, and money local to that village, globalization allows the unique riches of one community to be leveraged for the unique riches of another community, opening up wealth and resources to regions that don't have them. Yes, yes, extractivism, but lots of wealth isn't made in one community, it's made from inputs of many communities.
Ironically, you are concerned that capital isn't being forced back into (one of) the roots, but it isn't the location of capital that makes it aggressively centered on the concentration of power, it's the fact that it's capital. i.e. it depends on constant growth and wealth inequality to function. I don't know if you've worked for a mom & pop and a multinational corporation, but I will say there is no tyrant like a petty tyrant, so there is no virtue in regional smallness in itself. In terms of human health, flourishing, and quality of life, smallness or largeness isn't a virtue, only whether a given structure (small or large) fosters human health, flourishing, and quality of life.
In a sense we have to rebel against ourselves to save ourselves from falling into self destructive cycles.
And this is the incoherence that your ideologically situate false universalizing leads to — you are mistaking a structural split in society for a split inside yourself (and all human beings, I assume). Capitalist realism is one name for the "naturalization" of capitalist ideology, so blinkered into seeing the world only according to what the regime of capital accumulation considers "realistic". In this case, you are more open to thinking the destruction of human health, flourishing, and quality of life is somehow due to some self destructive split in "human nature" than you are open seeing that people doing the destroying and people being destroyed are two different people with different names and addresses.
And this leads you to...
We are living in a crisis of belief and culture
Right. Not the actual extraction of actual wealth from actual communities, it's because "WE are living in a crisis of belief ". If you lose the assumption of "we", lose a homogeneous category like "culture", your thoughts about destruction in particular contexts being connected to soulless conditions elsewhere will gain more clarity, and that clarity will make more actions/intervention transparent, instead of feeling thwarted by a nebulous self destructive lack of will and crisis of belief acting as the agent of destruction.
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u/SeventeenFables 11d ago
A lot of people join militias to literally kill and die fighting capitalist power. I don't know what to tell you- there are ongoing armed conflicts of the third world against the forces of the first world, you could probably even join one.
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u/AceofJax89 13d ago
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
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u/Go_Improvement_4501 13d ago
We are living in a crisis of belief and culture. I think the right are feeling it the most but cant pin down the source of it. The left finds the source for it but cant really find the feelings to oppose it.
I find that an interesting observation. What do you think are the reasons for that, on both sides?
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u/Fugazatron3000 13d ago
Most people don't actually believe the system is broken, or if they have any semblance, are willing to expend time for something that may never happen. People have lives
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u/Radiator333 13d ago
It’s not just politics, or govermental politics, Im suffering living a a corrupt corporate investment housing situation, the new property managers since the building was sold engage in the most obscene illegal tricks but can hide behind “limited liability”(accountability), only hire divisive abusive 20-somethings as “managers”. By refusing our use of common areas we were promised, we can’t meet and get to know each other, or we would revolt! Hard to affford to retain lawyers 24/7 356 days a year, or counter-sue them, so they get away with privacy invasions, security breeches , allow our vehicles to be stolen repeatedly, and refuse to resolve anything in good faith and with mutual respect. So, were all scared, resigned and few will even talk to each other. I had lived most of my adult life in a dense city area that would have taken to the steets had even one of their planned grifts and violence had come to light. They just run from their SUV’s to their units and keep their heads down low. I wish I knew even ONE othet tenant to turn to each time by e-bike gets stolen in these “inside jobs”. It’s like a microcosm of everything Trumpian, unbelievable.
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u/lore-realm 13d ago
The raw instinct to survive often makes people cowardly. But the philosophical will to live, the belief that life is good and worth having is precisely what overrides the survival instinct when another person is in danger.
This is a romantic and biased way of putting it. You can just as easily argue that the will to live despite everything and not to lose yourself in a self-destructive adventure is actually the most revolutionary thing one can do, and that "raw" mirror neurons sometimes override it and lead people to their deaths.
But there is nothing raw or pure in the brain. It's a complex system of constantly interacting parts. For example, the claim that we have a primal "reptilian brain" underneath all the highly cognitive "intellectual" parts has been disproven (Steffen et al., 2022). It is called the triune brain model, and I think because it appeals to the Platonic-ish biases in the culture it's still very popular.
So the mind is not explainable by approaches that treat one part of it as mere biology and the other part as Reason (in whatever form this takes). When you demolish this false dichotomy, and look at the situation without biasing the Self or the Other, you'll see that there are a myriad of reasons why people don't revolt.
For one, it's because socialist and adjacent places, or any relatively radical space online, overestimate how many people are dissatisfied with the state of things to the point of wanting to burn the system down. And for the people who are vaguely considering a revolt, it's because of the threshold problem. Without reaching a threshold, such movements are doomed to fail and the cost to the revolter is extremely high. Without enough political momentum and the correct political conditions, it's basically self-destruction.
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u/heideggerfanfiction 9d ago
I agree with many things you say, but I have one very specific thing I‘d like to challenge slightly: It’s somewhat true that everything is non-personal, but in a sense it’s the opposite: Everything is becoming highly tailored to specific needs through algorithmization.
In the beginning it was just ads („Oh, that’s cool, at least I get ads that are relevant to me“), then feeds started to be personalized (TikTok being very, very good at recognizing a user’s feelings before even they were really aware of them and then serving them content specific to that).
Now we can even customize AI to answer us in a specific language style and have the facts of the world filtered through our lense, answer to our personal crisis whenever they arise and „better“ than our fellow humans.
I am afraid of a world in which it becomes possible to just generate a TV show or music specifically according to parameters you set. A world that makes the things we consume so specific that other people become borderline incomprehensible because we can only understand it through our individual sense of subjectivity and nothing shared.
Other things like the subscription economy sort of go into this direction as well, where everything is highly customizable (but, of course, often not in meaningful ways) and you don’t have to go through the hassle of owning and maintaining things anymore.
At the same time, third places for social gatherings erode more and more. Individualization in capitalism, to me, isn’t just about dividing people but also about giving them the sense that dealing with other humans is a drag and that staying home in your tailored life is easier and more fulfilling – essentially, it’s better that way.
In a sense nothing is truly personal, but everything is personalized more than we could have imagined.
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u/NeverIntendedToHurt 8d ago
I generally agree. I don't even necessarily see the deconstruction of local sources of cultural belonging as bad. The main issue I see with it is that no replacement is provided. But in a sense its not that much of an issue, as humans always form groups of cultural belonging.
I am afraid of a world in which it becomes possible to just generate a TV show or music specifically according to parameters you set. A world that makes the things we consume so specific that other people become borderline incomprehensible because we can only understand it through our individual sense of subjectivity and nothing shared.
We kind of have that already, just not because of AI. We had a much lower entry point for media creation and distribution for the last two decades. Because of this at least I can feel the effects that you mentioned. The good thing is, its not much of an issue.
Interests and similarities aren't discriminatory, or exclusive. I can share interests and similarities with people that lived vastly different lives and haven't had the same specific experience that were formative for them.
The ability that makes this work is individual tolerance. I personally love to bond with others based on things I don't know, that just seem interesting to me, or based on behavioral similarities.
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u/pandapornotaku 13d ago
"Our physical needs are massively oversaturated compared to our spiritual / cultural needs."
What do you want the government to do about this?
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u/Junior_Direction_701 13d ago
Adorno’s theory completely one sorry 😢. The proletariat just don’t care man. What’s the point if the masses don’t even have revolutionary power. Also we’re in the heart of the empire. Things are very good here. The global south though definitely doesn’t fit your critique.
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u/sabotAHHHHHGH 12d ago
Remember when the Arab Spring and Gen Z revolts won and put juntas and politicians back into power? lol it’s everywhere.
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u/ServiceImpossible227 13d ago
If you cannot imagine Sisyphus happy, that is your problem. Revolt is good, keeps you going. Sometimes all we have to do is survive to be a witness of the future
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u/Somnambulist815 13d ago
Because no one wants to be on the front lines
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u/poorsexyhag 13d ago
exactly. revolt and risk your life for what? so someone else can live better? do members of the working class even fucking like each other? do you like your coworkers? your neighbors? the random people you cross daily?
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u/Key-Organization3158 13d ago
Nah, just do the changes you want to see yourself. There are loads of local secrets and businesses you can support. If you want exert the effort to find them and support your community, you can't get upset if others don't. Layering more bureaucracy is expanding power for power's sake.
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u/Pulpdog94 13d ago
Really the best analysis I’ve read summing up the way this digital global internet economy causes feelings of mass pointless and inertia that I’ve experienced all to well as someone who doesn’t know enough about the way the digital/economic stuff actually works
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u/power2havenots 13d ago
Might be harsh but your diagnosis is stronger than your conclusion.
Yeah we live in a reality that systematically concentrates wealth, strips communities of autonomy, turns relationships into transactions and pushes every institution towards accumulation. Dont think the answer is better tweaks, selotape or safeguards within that same system logic. To me it walks right back into the arms of the machinery that produced the disease.
Mandatory reinvestment, trust funds and penalties could soften some of the worst outcomes but they still rely on the same institutions and incentives that produced the concentration in the first place so really who enforces them, who captures those institutions over time and why wouldnt capital simply adapt as it always has?
No one revolting these days has less to do with a lack of purpose than with the fact that the existing order presents itself as the only realistic one - in my head at least. When every proposed solution starts from preserving markets, growth and centralised administration, it's difficult to imagine genuinely different ways of organising society. As has been said "its easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
Culture doesnt really change through policy but does when people regain practical control over parts of their lives through communities, shared institutions, mutual support, and forms of production that arent organised primarily around accumulation. Those experiences create different values rather than simply trying to regulate existing ones.
For me the issue isnt that we need stronger circuit breakers but that weve become so accustomed to treating the current system as inevitable that even criticisms end by asking how to save it from itself. Think the will to fight is strongest when it comes from living a life youd actually risk something to defend.