Why Revolution?

I was planning on making my final "serious" blog post to get the full 10% for the blog posts, but noticed someone was questioning why we even needed to overthrow Xavier. As the unofficial leader of the revolution now that the other guy has apparently given up, I thought I could perhaps analyse why exactly revolutions emerge in the first place while tying it to recent events in the class - and still getting a point towards my blog contributions.

There is one overarching reason for my involvement in the revolution: I was bored and think its funny, okay.  In the the real world, however, revolution rarely seems to come out of a romantic desire for freedom and equality. Rather, it seems to usually be sparked by a potential improvement in living standards and dissatisfaction with the ruling elite. While the common people of France where in the midst of starvation, the nobiltiy feasted.  Promises of liberty, equality and fraternity where as much about equal access to resoruces as freedom. Later on, the people of Russia where swayed by promises of 'peace, land and bread' rather than the nuances of communist theory - hence why the Mensheviks recieved barely any votes in the first legislative election, while the Socialist Revolutionaries (who ran mostly on a policy of land collectivisation) received more than Lenins Bolsheviks. Lenins October revolution is actually better described as a coup than a revolution, if we stick to the traditional definitions of both.

Why then, should we overthrow the party that governs this course? Xavier may have given you some class points to try and keep you happy, but you can have as many points as you want if you seize the means by which they are produced. The party, menawhile, are less the pigs and more the fleas on the pig - their only job is to make sure people know what readings they should do, and they have somehow failed. If we were able to speak freely, we could just post what readings we are planning on doing in the blog and figure out what readings we should summarise from their. Finally, Xavier isnt really cut out for tyranny - if anything, he is a slave to the role he has created for himself, halfheartedly censoring posts (you can still read the text he has blacked out, and you can update posts he has censored) and spending his time trying to keep the population docile. I think he would be pretty stoked having purely symbolic power. Finally, a revolution wouldn't even cut into class time: a successfull revolution would even get rid of the weekly reports on fridays - thus making it more efficient in the long run.

So in conclusion, you really have nothing to lose but your chains - bloody go for it.