Likelihood---will it happen? and

Viability--- can it live?

The piece is not about viability, but about likelihood. The author does not really address the question of whether what follows will be an improvement over what is discarded.

Likelihood---will it happen? and

Viability--- can it happen?

A Political Revolution is a dynamic self-reproducing process. That's one substantial difference between a Political Revolution and a golpe de estado (or what the Frances would call a coup d'etat). A golpe de estado is an event ... a group of people taking power, after which they try to govern.

Or to use an analogy, a golpe de estado is like an ax striking a tree. A Political Revolution is like a Forest Fire.

And like a Forest Fire, a Political Revolution is very hard, and often in any practical sense impossible, to get started, and once started very hard to stop.

The viability refers to that initial condition ... can a Political Revolution get launched and continue long enough to start to catch fire?

I am not referring to the "viability" of declared aims of Revolutionaries that emerge from the process ... precisely because a Revolution is such a rare state of affairs for a polity, many declared aims are going to fall by the wayside as a post-Revolutionary status quo emerges.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.