Do you think that people need to be unhappy to want change? Like would happy people do a Revolution or is it only people who feel miserable with the status quo?
To have some revolutionary potential, you need to see the injustice in the world. You don't have to directly experience this injustice to see it, which is why John Brown is such a cool motherfucker.
At the other end of the "change" spectrum, the royal family in the UK do some charity work to "change" things. Maybe they do believe that people shouldn't starve, but system change is against their material interests.
Maybe I can add my personal experience on this. Looking at my own life, I could say I am pretty happy and comfortable. I have a stable job, a stable income, a place to live I can afford, a healthy relationship, a good family and a good group of friends. If I were to only look at myself I could see no need for a revolution.
But I don't just look at myself. I look around and see many that don't have what I have and I think that is unfair. I think it is unfair that a select group of people who are richer than 99% of us get to make the decisions that ruin other people's lives and the planet. And I think that we should do something about that.
So is it unhappiness that drives me? No, I think you should rather call it a drive for justice.
But then again yes unhappy people are by far the majority of people in the revolution I think
I'm in a similar situation here as well. To expand on that a bit, it's not only unfair that a select few people are the primary beneficiaries of how our economy is organized, but it's also the fact that these people decide how resources and labor are allocated. Even having a comfortable lifestyle under capitalism robs people of having any meaning in their labor, because its sole purpose is to generate profit. Many jobs that exist have no social value, and some are actively harmful to society.
I know that being unhappy (as an individual) can lead to inhibition. Procrastination, addiction, escapism, doomerism etc. "Happy people" (whatever that means) do change things and are interested in change, but not necessarily in revolution.
I think a revolution can only happen if some people are so miserable that they have nothing to lose. Because the amount of people who aren't miserable, and are still willing to sacrifice their comfort to help working towards a goal greater than themselves is pretty low.
Is it more important to focus on the former or the latter type? idk!
It does seem that social upheaval tends to happen when material conditions deteriorate to the point when a critical mass of people that starts to see their situation as being unbearable. Originally, Marx and Engels speculated that socialist revolutions would occur in advanced capitalist societies, but they proved to be the most resilient.
Happy individuals can help work towards a revolution, definitely, but two things required for a successful revolution are often horrifying conditions that lead people to want to overthrow the existing order and an organizational framework that allows for the proper decisionmaking to happen necessary for a revolution.
When presented with a choice, people will generally choose the path of least resistance. People change when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.
Don't underestimate the power of propaganda, for one. And for another, remember that the hardest part of any revolution is the organizing and logistics while under threat of the existing power. Whether a person is desperate for anything different or doing decently well but believes in better, the planning has to be there. And things can go wrong even with a plan and require adjustment. A lot of what I'm saying is basics that can be seen even in capitalist military thinking; the main difference being that in a socialist/communist revolution, the goal is not to mold people into drones for a cause that benefits their masters, but to empower them to stand with each other for a better life for everyone.
People want their needs met consistently and will only go along with so much if they can't eat, but we can see that when they're in a more middling area of things, they can be made to think what they have is better than it is, or as good as it gets. It's dark, but look at how some people in the US have been lied to about alternatives; they'll readily agree things aren't exactly amazing, but struggle to admit a better world is possible, much less through a historically tested means like communism. Because their view of it has been warped by propaganda, to see it as something that is always worse. This from the government that did MKUltra, tried to literally mind control people. It shouldn't be a surprise they have some effectiveness in tricking their own citizenry. And this is part of what communists have to contend with, even if the degree of deception is not the same in every capitalist-dominated country. A desperate enough person who believes aliens have taken over isn't going to start a communist revolution; they're going to do something wild and unpredictable. What a person believes does matter. They don't have to be a full blown communist to back a working class movement, but they can't be thinking it's the worst thing ever either or they'll cave the first time slander comes out about it, if they are even willing to risk anything for it at all in the first place.
I disagree. At one point, it's not that all people are being brainwashed, though educated and conditioned, but that now, especially in the Global North, it becomes a license for them to feel good about their social position, that is dependent on capitalism.
They may see the system as the source of their wealth or current lifestyle, as a last resort of 'rationality'
But why would they feel good about their social position? A lot of them aren't even doing that well - but then you see that phenomenon of like how that one person put it (forget their name offhand), the quote about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" where people sort of see themselves more as part of the ruling class, but someone who just hasn't "made it" yet through some fault of their own. I'm not saying it's 100% brainwashing superimposed over people's living conditions, without any interplay between the two, but surely they aren't organically coming to a state of mind such as that. It's one thing for them to be afraid of worse if they have relative comfort. It's another for them to believe they can be rich any day now if they just work it out through the right "individual choices".
In case it's not clear, I'm not here arguing that propaganda is the defining factor. Just that it's not one that should be underestimated as an influence over things. I mean, the US has been wielding it for decades, alongside other tools, to help carry out color revolutions the world over. There are limits to it, but countries that want to guard against that take narrative control seriously for a reason.