A democratic system is more resilient than an autocracy.  The continuation precedes from it's ability for new Bottom/Up entities and entity types to form and then flourish.  By "entity" I mean something that is capable of sensation, perception, action, schema, and goal directed behavior.  By "entity type" I mean a difference in Property -- including form, epistemology, function, & etc -- from those found previously.  

Historically, the superiority of the democratic versus an autocratic form of government can be see in the responses of the US versus the Wiemar Republics under the stress of economic breakdown: the Great Depression.  Similarity between my two examples can be seen in the mechanism by which both countries finally found a way out: gearing their respective country's economies for war.  In Germany this started in 1934, if not before.  In the US it started in 1940.

If the (Republic form of) democracy and the autocracy both had to resort to the same economic stimulus package, as it were, doesn't this bring the economic system under analysis?  I would argue that it does.

Here we find a similarity as well.  Both countries, despite differing political systems had the (roughly) same economic system: predatory capitalism.  In both countries a small plutocratic class controlled the financial systems as well as, or in addition to the "Means of Production," or because they owned the first they owned the latter.  The control is so accepted today that is relative newness, in the 1930s, is overlooked.  

My knowledge is primarily of the US, so that's what I'll talk about.

The Joint Stock Company with limited liability -- the corporation, as we know it today -- came into existence in the US in the 1880s and it was the manipulation of the financial system and the assembly-line mass production of goods in factories created to produce the armaments for WW I (war, again) that combined in an over-stimulated economy that crashed when the consumer finally had to stop accumulating new stuff to pay for the stuff already consumed.

Is this sounding familiar?

Predatory capitalism, in short, is the alliance between the Financier/Rentier and the "owners" -- actually the controllers -- of the major business organizations.  Together they comprise the plutocracy that depends on an ever increasing supply of money to fuel credit purchase of the stuff (goods and services) the business organizations pump out.  Together they give money (salaries) to the producing class but then vacuum every last cent they can grab back from the producing class by putting the producers into ever increasing debt through high rates of compound interest.  Even shorter: predatory capitalism is a system of debt peonage.

It is this system that has to change.  

That's the revolution I'm interested in.  (YMM, of course,V)

That's the revolution Obama and Clinton ... and McCain and Huckabee and Brown and Blair and Merkel and Putin and all the rest of the scum fine upstanding global political figures, have no interest in undertaking.  And why should they?  If you can con persuade people to send you millions of dollars, pounds, euros, rubles, or whatever per month to go around flapping your yap about how you are going to change things ... why change things?  And after you haven't changed things the predators will kindly invite you, at high wages, to come to a fancy resort and tell them how peachy-keen things are and much you didn't change things.

And, after all, for the predators and their lickspittles things are peachy-keen.

In this environment, a "revolution" would mean "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss."  Because nothing has been done about creating new entities and schema.  (Remember them? :-)  UNTIL AND UNLESS these are created the Revolution CANNOT happen.  When these new entities are created in mass the Revolution WILL happen¹.  

These entities and schema are boringly familiar: co-ops, industrial democracy, credit unions, communitarian oriented living, unions, worker owned businesses, and so on yawn.  When these entities, which exist already - I ain't talking nothing new - proliferate such that they are the economy and when the producers garner the economic benefits of the wealth they produce:

THAT'S a revolution.

Is the US ready for such a change?  Nope.  But it is much more ready than it was 40 years ago?  Yup.  Will it be even more ready 40 years from now?  Beats the heck outta me.  

What I do know is: this current crock of a system cannot permanently endure.  It is mathematically and ecologically impossible.  It will change.  

In that, for that, I see a bit of hope with Obama.  Not in him, specifically, but in the organizations and social/political movement he has sparked.  When he fails to deliver, as fail he almost certainly must, some will be ripe for, and move for, real change.

IMO.

¹ Sorry for shouting

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre