Structureless populations make revolutions easy to win but hard to secure
Evidence
The October Revolution’s amazingly easy victory occurred in a country where a despotic and centralized bureaucracy governed a structureless mass population which neither the remnants of the rural feudal orders nor the weak, nascent urban capitalist classes had organized. When Lenin said that nowhere in the world would it have been so easy to win power and so difficult to keep it, he was aware not only of the weakness of the Russian working class, but of anarchic social conditions in general, which favored sudden changes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 762
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Lenin’s dictum grounds the claim that unorganized masses are simultaneously most manipulable and least governable — relevant to later readings on why totalitarian and colonial projects both need to manufacture order.