The internal structure of communication codes makes radical redistribution impossible.

Evidence

Even truth, even money and even love are in this sense omnipresent. Participating in them, whether positively or negatively, is a necessity of existence. Evolutionary changes in such codes thus always affect the fortunate and the unfortunate simultaneously – those who can love and those who get to know through new types of symbols that they cannot love; those who have property and money and those who do not. Code-change can, indeed, to some extent, lead to a new distribution of opportunities, but the ‘inner logic’ of the code, the non-arbitrary nature of the arrangement of symbols, usually stops innovation from leading to radical redistribution. It can never be that all nonproperty-owners become property-owners, because this would mean that everyone owns everything, in other words everyone would own nothing. The structure of all media-codes makes ‘revolutions’ impossible. It individualizes and operationalizes all processes of movement. Codes are catalysts for historical and self-substituting orderings. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 765

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that all media-codes make ‘revolutions’ impossible is sweeping — does Luhmann allow any structural escape hatch, or only code-internal substitution?
• XREF: Relevant to Lord Darlington’s case: the code’s inner logic forecloses radical change, so individual deference is channeled into accumulating existing power rather than transforming it. — connects to: Media’s total mobilization makes communication of transcending contents technically impossible — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 312