Oh yeah, it’s definitely not a remotely revolutionary action in itself, but like minor strikes and leftish politicians, it’s one of those things that plants a seed of radicalisation - it’s kind of a pain having people be weird about it, but having to tell people that my parents are married, have kept their own names, and gave me my mother’s surname has caused a few of them to actually question why taking the husband/father’s name is normal.
Proletarian revolution is still way off on the horizon here in the imperial core - if anything I fear we’re still more at risk of even-more-reactionary uprisings as the treats dry up - so every little thing that causes someone to start questioning their beliefs gives us an opportunity to illuminate and contextualise with the ultimate aim of awakening class consciousness. It’s a bit like introducing concepts through demonstrations in teaching - a Van der Graaf generator isn’t particularly important in physics, but getting people to ask how their hair stands up gives you room to start explaining electricity and polarities.

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Why’s it gotta start with you, rather than retroactively accounting for as far back in your ancestry as you can go?

And how do you do the ordering of all those names?

Jugemu Jugemu Gokou no Surikire Kaijari Suigyou no Suigyou Matsu Unrai Matsu Fuurai Matsu Kuuneru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yabura Kouji no Bura Kouji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shuuringan Shuuringan no Guurindai Guurindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonaa no Choukyuumei no Chousuke but every part except “Chousuke” was actually the surname

No, children should get all their parents’ surnames ad infinitum. My grandkids will have 8 surnames. Their grandkids will have 32.

Say what you want, but this system has the fewest edge cases.

Having names like the ones breeders give to purebred dogs would be hilarious.

So in Europe up until this point, people stayed in their own villages and if there were two Johns in the same village then one would be Tall John and the other would be Pious John, or Strong John or Fair(haired) John. Basically you were your first name because there was absolutely no need for a surname.

The only use for surnames was for the aristocracy to lay claim to their incestuous lineage and their ancestral holdings and shit.

Anyway, suddenly the black death rolls around and wipes out 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in Europe. Crops are lying in the field to rot because there just isn’t enough labour available to do what needs to be done to survive until next season.

So the landlords smell trouble brewing and it becomes obvious that unless somebody harvests that grain then their village is fucked, and they sure as hell aren’t about to roll up their velvet sleeves, so they begin to lure nearby villagers to abandon their lord and the crops of their home village in favour of shifting next door and harvesting this lord’s crops with the promise of better pay and conditions.

Suddenly, where feudalism was once virtually set in stone, you have this black swan event and all this labour begins to get freed up to move around and labour starts to get a little bit of leverage as the foundations of feudalism begin to crack.

So next thing you have people from all sorts of villages moving around from place to place and everyone is named John and Henry and Margaret and Catherine and shit but also nobody knows anyone else because suddenly there’s this influx of people from everywhere else. So this ain’t cutting it anymore, and people begin to get named after their professions (John the blacksmith = John Blacksmith = John Smith, Henry the fuller = Henry Fuller, Margaret the baxter = Margaret Baxter etc.) or by things like patronymics (Johnson, Smithson, Ericson) or their personally-distinguishing characteristics or landmarks (in German this is really common with surnames like Bach, Bohm, Berger, Engel).

Anyway this is the moment where the tide started to shift and where feudalism was moribund - it would take other factors like the enclosure of the commons, the advent of chartered corporations for naval looting/trading/mass slaughter and enslavement expeditions, and the invention of the steam engine before we would see capitalism develop into its fully-fledged form but this freeing up of labour power and a rebalancing of economic and political power that shifted slightly in favour of serfs was enough that the house of cards that was feudalism would eventually come tumbling down.

And that’s why surnames heralded the downfall of feudalism - as soon as labour stopped being bound to one ancestral plot of land and lords started competing against one another for “employees” (if you’ll forgive me for using an anarchronism), where people needed a new way to distinguish between people who shared the same name, there the proto-capitalist/nascent capitalist market forces began to emerge within the cracks in the foundations of the old feudal material conditions.

This story itself is a real trip. If I didn’t know it by doing my own reading into all of it, there’s zero chance I’d believe this is anything but some Pepe Silvia-tier rambling.

I need to sleep so I’m going to be a bit brief on this one but here goes:

Edward Bernays is the self-styled “father” of modern PR. This is a half-truth but it’s not entirely a lie. He’s the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he lives in high society in New York. Bernays decides that he wants to apply Freud’s psychoanalytic model to marketing and PR. He literally writes a book titled Propaganda, which would one day find its way onto the bookshelf of none other than Goebbels, who used it as his bible to persecute Jews like Bernays and, of course, Freud himself who fled Nazi Germany at the behest of Bernays.

Anyway, Bernays’ wife is a socialite and she is a key figure in the Lucy Stone League (linked in the comment above) as well as other bourgeois feminist organisations and movements.

Bernays, ever the opportunist and in the employ of a tobacco company, uses this as an opportunity to start marketing to women and in one famous coup of the early PR industry, he staged a situation where a feminist demonstration in New York would have a photograph taken of one of the main organisers smoking - women smoking in public was seen as scandalous at this time - to be published as the lead story in the newspapers, putting cigarette consumption front-and-centre in women’s struggle for equality.

He dubs this the “Torches of Freedom” movement and associates the idea of women smoking closely with the statue of liberty and her blazing torch.

Suddenly it becomes edgy and cool and seriously rebellious for women—upper class women who don’t have the same risk of social backlash—so it becomes a trend, cigarette sales skyrocket, and Bernays starts working on marketing cigarettes to women. This is also an early example of gender division in marketing. There’s the annual equivalent of the Met Gala taking place and so Bernays attempts to associate the colour green—a key colour in Lucky Strike packaging at the time—with this Green Gala held for rich socialites so that it would tie in with the cigarette packaging.

At some point, idk exactly when, box cake mix gets developed but it’s not selling very well. This is at a point where I think all of the ingredients except for water and maybe butter/oil (but maybe not) were already powdered and you literally just add water to make a cake. Bernays, high on the Freudian supply, decides that what needs to happen is that there needs to be some symbolic action of feminity in these instant cake mixes so he instructs the company to remove the powdered egg and change the recipe to call for adding fresh eggs because, like, women and eggs and ovulation and feminine energy and weird shit like that. This works, not for the tortured Freudian symbolic reasoning Bernays held but because women felt like they were still making a cake rather than just making a bowl of cereal. (Not gonna go into the advent of the hearty American bacon and eggs breakfast or the “9 out of 10 [professionals] recommend…” marketing trope, but that’s also tangentially related to this story.)

At some point you have Chiquita (then United Fruit Company) basically running Guatemala as an imperial outpost. Then Jacobo Arbenz, a milquetoast social democrat reformer, gets elected on a very popular platform of land reform - Chiquita maintained an effective monopoly on banana growing in Guatemala by purchasing all of the land and only using a proportion of it to actually grow crops with the rest left fallow. People were borderline starving and they were prevented from primary production to create products to sell because Chiquita owned all the good, arable land so the people of Guatemala were condemned to poverty and hard labour on—you guessed it—Chiquita banana plantations so the US could have cheap bananas and Chiquita could turn a mean profit doing so. Chiquita also grossly underestimated the value of the land for taxation purposes so Arbenz quite cleverly decides that his government will compulsorily acquire the fallow land to redistribute to the people and he compensated Chiquita based on the grossly underreported value of the land.

Chiquita wasn’t having a bar of it.

So they get Bernays to organise a press junket tour of Guatemala so that the newspapers can drum up support for a military invasion of Guatemala to establish what would later become known as a banana republic. (From memory the US political machinery was less interested in committing to war at this point in history, but don’t quote me on that part.) And this strategy works. (I feel like Bernays had some connections to the CIA that he leveraged in this but I forget.)

Anyway, who happens to be in Guatemala at the time of the coup? None other than the man, the legend, the hero of the people himself - Che Guevara. Che has front row tickets to witnessing US imperialism and the lengths that they will go to when their precious bottom line faces a minor speed bump. And this is a deeply radicalising moment for Che because he understands that there is no reform delicate enough, there is no popular support massive enough, there is no cause morally just enough that would stay the US’ hand.

So Che learns that political power comes out the barrel of a gun and this goes on to directly shape his politics, his strategy, and the Cuban revolution itself.

And that’s the story. Some of it anyway lol.

Sources:
Bitter Fruit by Steven Kinzer

The Father of Spin by Larry Tye (honestly not a great book - pretty piss-poor writing tbh but obviously the compelling subject redeems it somewhat)

Idk what else, I think that’s mostly it. I’m missing out on a source for Che’s part of the story but maybe someone will chime in with a good one - surely he wrote about it in The Motorcycle Diaries right?