Social revolution
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Illustration:Liberty Leading the People (1831, detail) by Eugène Delacroix.
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The term social revolution may have different connotations depending on the speaker.
In the Trotskyist movement, the term "social revolution" refers to an upheaval in which existing property relations are smashed. Examples include the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the Cuban Revolution, as both caused capitalist (and in some cases pre-capitalist) property relations to turn into post-capitalist property relations as they operated by plan rather than by market. Social revolutions are contrasted with purely political revolutions in which the government is replaced, or the form of government altered, but in which property relations are predominantly left intact. Social revolutions do not imply necessarily that the working class as a whole has control over the production and distribution of capital and goods - in countries such as Cuba this is done by a caste in the form of the Cuban Communist Party - they just mean that the market is no longer used, and that the capitalist class has been expropriated.
In libertarian socialist and anarchist parlance, a "social revolution" is a bottom-up, as opposed to vanguard-led or purely political, revolution aiming to reorganize all of society. In the words of Peter Kropotkin, "social revolution means the reorganization of the industrial, economic life of the country and consequently also of the entire structure of society."
More generally, the term "social revolution" may be used to refer to a massive change in society, for instance the French Revolution, the American Civil Rights Movement and the 1960 hippie or counterculture reformation on religious belief, personal identity, freedom of speech, music and arts, fashion, alternative technology or environmentalism and decentralised media.
See also
