All left-wing parties consciously or unconsciously aspire to a revolution. You see, the French and Russian Revolutions have imbued the collective unconscious with a romantic notion of emancipation, while the reality is much darker. One gave birth to the Terror and the massacre of the Vendée, the other was the precursor to what would become mass incarceration and the millions of murders inflicted by the Stalinist gulag’s concentrationary system. A revolution without evolution leads to the replacement of oppressors by other forms of power that are just as brutal. Revolution is a decoy that diverts us from the true lever of change.
Change is Not Elsewhere but Here and Now
The trap of revolution is that it promises a bright future while having the unpleasant consequence of depriving us of the power to change in the present. There is a form of passivity when closely examining revolutionary aspirations. These divert us from our true ability to propose a better collective future by paradoxically having an individual approach.
By Improving the Individual, We Advance the Collective
The idea of revolution is that it’s the improvement of the collective that creates better individual conditions. History has shown that this isn’t always true and it can even be quite the opposite. An evolutionary approach works exactly inversely by trying to improve our individual consciousness so that it can then have a cascading or trickle-down effect on others.
There is No True Revolution Without a Prior Evolution of Consciousness
If past revolutions have disappointed, it is because people did not do the preliminary work necessary to improve their consciousness. The revolution should actually be the concrete manifestation of the evolution of collective consciousness. If you force people to change in a purely external way, they will revert to their original state, namely tyranny in the case of past revolutions. It’s a bit like when someone who has lived in poverty wins the lottery; most often, they end up just as broke after a few years. Revolution is a natural and logical consequence of a collective inner effort. This is essentially what religions aspire to and manifest very imperfectly due to the focus on changing the external behavior of their followers (dress code, recourse to coercion or violence to convince, exacerbated ritualism or fetishism, etc.).
