Becoming the Revolution: Beyond Buying and Making
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. — Ursula K. Le Guin
From Commodity to Conduct
Le Guin’s opening refusal of buying punctures the fantasy that justice can be swiped at checkout. Cause marketing and buycotts may alter margins, yet they seldom transform relations of power. Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) tracks how brands absorb dissent, turning rebellion into style. As platforms promise frictionless giving, the habits of hierarchy persist; a receipt is not a reordering of life. Thus the quote pivots us from transaction to transformation, asking what changes when we treat revolution not as an item but as a way of being. If purchasing fails, the next temptation is engineering: can we at least manufacture revolution like a product?
Why Revolutions Resist Being Made
Le Guin’s second refusal warns that upheaval is not built on an assembly line. Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) emphasizes action’s unpredictability: freedom erupts when people appear together in public, not when plans unfold like blueprints. History underlines this contingency; Tunisia’s 2010 uprising began with Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act, then cascaded through networks, grievances, and courage no committee could script. Attempts at top-down design often harden into bureaucracy before the new society breathes. Consequently, the revolution that endures tends to grow from common life rather than command. That insight leads to the heart of her claim: if you cannot buy or make it, you must become it.
Being as Prefigurative Praxis
To be the revolution is to practice, now, the relationships one seeks to universalize. Scholars call this prefigurative politics: the means must mirror the ends. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2002) argues for cracks in the dominant order where new social logics can be lived. Occupy Wall Street’s general assemblies and the Zapatistas’ autonomous councils offered imperfect but instructive rehearsals of horizontal power. Such experiments are not mere tactics; they are pedagogy, training bodies and imaginations in different habits of cooperation. Yet practices need stories to cohere and spread, which is where Le Guin’s craft becomes more than literature.
Imagination as Infrastructure
Le Guin’s worlds function as prototypes for being otherwise. The Dispossessed (1974) renders an anarchist society whose daily frictions and solidarities teach readers what abstract theory cannot; Always Coming Home (1985) imagines culture as a living ecology rather than a commodity. In her National Book Awards speech (2014), she insisted we need writers who can see alternatives to how we live now. Stories do not replace action, but they make new action thinkable, then sayable, then doable. Thus narrative binds prefigurative practice, offering blueprints for feeling and fairness. To inhabit such worlds, however, people must unlearn and relearn together, which brings us to education as liberation.
Learning to Become: Critical Consciousness
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) frames liberation as a cycle of reflection and action, where people name their world and change it. SNCC’s Freedom Schools (1964) embodied this approach, combining civic study with concrete organizing so that students became protagonists, not clients. Being the revolution therefore grows through shared inquiry, conflict-resolution skills, and practical stewardship of common goods. It is teachable, but never purely academic; the classroom is the picket line, the clinic, the cooperative meeting. Once people learn to act together, the system tries to sell it back to them as a lifestyle, which raises the perennial problem of co-optation.
Guarding Against Co-optation
When revolt becomes fashion, its edge dulls. Che Guevara’s visage on fast-fashion tees and corporate woke-washing exemplify what Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism (2009), called the system’s knack for absorbing its critiques. To be the revolution, communities set boundaries: no exploitation-funded sponsorships, transparent governance, and mutual accountability that resists celebrity capture. Codes of conduct and political education keep practices aligned with purpose when attention and money arrive. This vigilance is crucial online, where virality can outrun integrity, so the next question is how embodiment and networks interact.
Embodiment in a Networked Era
Digital platforms accelerate assembly, yet speed can outstrip structure. Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas (2017) shows how networked movements mobilize masses quickly but struggle to develop strategy and durable organizations. Online amplification matters, but being the revolution demands embodied risk, care, and institutions that persist after trending ends. Blending the two means using networks to coordinate while rooting legitimacy in local assemblies, unions, and mutual aid. From this synthesis flows the work of building everyday alternatives strong enough to outlast a news cycle.
Building Everyday Institutions
Revolution as being settles into daily infrastructures: worker cooperatives, community land trusts, credit unions, and neighborhood clinics. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902) sketched this ethic; COVID-era mutual aid networks revived it at scale, delivering groceries, medicine, and solidarity when markets and states stumbled. Such institutions prefigure different property relations and care economies, proving that another way is not only imaginable but operable. And when enough people live these relations, a tipping point emerges where structures shift to match habits. In that sense, Le Guin’s line is instruction as much as epigram: stop shopping for change, stop scripting it for others—practice it until it is the way you live together.